Exit Wounds
by notmanos
Summary: A series of brutal killings in London has Logan looking for a supernatural source but the truth might be more bizarre. Meanwhile, almost everyone who escaped from Mirror Lake is being plagued by nightmares, and Scott is hunting down Bob.
1. Part 1

_Disclaimer: The character of Wolverine & the X Men is owned by 20th Century Fox and Marvel Comics. No copyright infringement intended. The characters of Angel are owned by 20th Century Fox and Mutant Enemy. Bob and his crew are all mine. Hands off._

_N.B.: Takes place shortly after "X2", and directly after "Flood land"._

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**EXIT WOUNDS**

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1

_London, England_

"This is so retarded," Katy complained, flicking her cigarette butt towards the nearest tombstone.

"Would you _not_ use that word," Rajiv griped, giving her a dirty look. His first cousin was retarded, and he was highly sensitive about it.

Katy sighed and rolled her eyes, shoulders sagging as she crossed her arms aggressively over her chest. "Fine, whatever. Why are we doing this Harry Potter shit anyways?"

"It was your idea in the first place, remember?" Adrian countered, laying out a blanket on the ground before the most recent grave.

"I thought this was more like Alistair Crowley shit," Clark said, lighting the first candle.

Glenn chuckled under his breath, and slid his backpack to the ground, where it landed with a dull and heavy thud. "You're all a buncha pussies."

"Ooh, mister high and mighty over here's gonna go up his own arse again," Katy chided. "Who has the torches?"

There were some weak laughs as Glenn and Katy got into one of their usual bitchfests, but Asha stood on the sidelines, ignoring them and wondering if this was such a good idea. Glenn and Katy were both popular, in a relationship with more twists and turns than the M-1, and she knew she was only here because she - in some moment of temporary insanity - gave Katy a ride home after she and Glenn had an explosive argument in the school car park. Asha had just transferred from her old school in Yorkshire three months before, and still hardly knew anyone; she also didn't know that Glenn and Katy broke up and got back together on a bi-weekly basis. Glenn was the star footballer who planned to carry it on to the professional level, and Katy … well, Katy was pretty. If she had any other function besides looking glamorous - which, admittedly, did seem to be a full time job - it wasn't immediately obvious.

Asha was sucked into the popular clique vortex on the coattails of Katy's pity, and she knew it. Every pretty girl had to have a fat and homely friend who was known for her "great personality", and Asha knew she was it. Katy never hung around people who weren't wealthy, chinless wonders, connected somehow, or also pretty, and she knew she didn't fit that bill. She was just the new, weird girl, the one with two recently dead parents, who lived with her dotty old Aunt Elspeth and her pet parrot in a second floor walk up, who was only known for being really quiet, and reading weird books.

One of those weird books that Glenn had just pulled out of his backpack.

When the kids asked about how her parents died, she always stuck to the official story, which was "car accident". But she didn't understand it, as they almost never commuted together, and she was sure her mother had actually caught a ride to work that day with her friend Raina. It was Auntie Els (as she called her) who spilled the beans one day, forgetting the lie she was supposed to tell her. "Some bastards blew them up, sweetie," she said almost dismissively, pouring fragrant chamomile tea into her slightly chipped china cups. "In their line of work, it was probably inevitable that some evil mastermind would find a way to get to them all. Two sugars?"

What were her parents? According to them, they worked for the government, but according to Auntie Els, they were something called "Watchers". "Think of them as supernatural police, in a way," Els told her, perfectly serious. "I used to be one too, but then, uh … oh dear, I can't remember. Well, something went wrong, and I was no longer able to function as an … oh, what was the word? Agent? No, but close enough. I wish I could remember what it was, but I don't anymore. Still, they didn't want you to get involved with it. They felt it was becoming too dangerous, and rightfully so, I may add. They should have gotten out themselves."

This was Auntie Els talking, so she couldn't trust her and her eccentric memories, but a web search turned up these weird paranormal pages that claimed to have news about the Watchers headquarters being blown up by these evil minions of some guys, and up to fifty people dying in the blast. But if that were true, why wasn't it reported on the real news? You'd think an explosion at a major building in the heart of London wouldn't go unnoticed, even if they were supposed "demon hunters".

But how could any of this shit be serious? Those same sites that mentioned the explosion also had "news" stories devoted to "demon attacks" and "vampire massacres", which simply had to be bullshit, no matter what the books her parents had said. Although so much of this world was weird and inexplicable, up to and including the death of her parents.

Her parents, whose locked liquor cabinet actually contained those strange books she found, books about demons (both good and bad - she couldn't help but think how her scary, aggressively Catholic great Uncle Roger would be devastated to learn demons could be good, and there was a hell of a lot more than one god … if any of it was true, of course … , about rituals and spells (it described witchcraft like it was an actual talent, like some people were more naturally inclined to it, like painting or piano playing), and, in a hidden room inside their library, had enough medieval weaponry - crossbows, swords, boxes of sharpened wooden things that could only be stakes - that it could have been a display in the Tower of London.

It was so strange she wasn't sure she had accepted it yet. Her parents were boring, regular people … who just happened to be living some bizarre secret life right under her nose. Still, it couldn't be true, could it? They must have been nuts, or supernatural historians or something, and she really didn't like the nuts theory.

She started reading the books she found - well, the ones in languages she could understand - and sneaking them to school, hiding them in dust jackets of more traditional books. This was what led to her downfall.

After giving her a lift, Katy had decided to adopt her at school, and Asha went along with it, having nothing better to do. One day, at lunch, the cover of the book she was reading slipped, and Katy saw some of the real cover. She didn't ask, as girls like Katy didn't ask for anything, they just took; she ripped it right out of her hands, and glanced at it. It was some kind of compendium, a book of demons and spells, legends, lore, and rituals, and it had quite a few black and white drawings, photos, and schematics, which was what drew Katy's eyes immediately. She passed it on to Glenn, and even though Asha claimed it was just this weird fictional book she picked up second hand at a jumble sale, no one believed her, and Glenn was convinced it was a genuine "black magic" book. Not that he believed in it, of course, but he didn't seem to disbelieve it either, or at least not enough to convince him they should leave this shit alone.

Glenn was the alpha male of this pack, and the others always followed his lead. If he jumped off the Albert Memorial, they'd all follow single file.

She didn't want to go along with this, but she did want her book back, and she knew that letting them go through with this was the only way to get it. As Clark started pouring the salt at Glenn's instruction, she was quick to sidle up next to Rajiv, as she didn't want to get stuck anywhere near Adrian. Rajiv was the token nerd of the group, the painfully shy and proper son of Indian immigrants who were so certain their son was going to be a doctor they'd already bought him a stethoscope. He was obedient, studying to be a doctor, but he seemed to have no passion for it at all; he was just a very dutiful son who didn't want to disappoint them. Glenn had adopted Rajiv as his "go to guy" for his homework, meaning Glenn had him do it for him, and in exchange, Rajiv got some much needed attention and acceptance.

Clark was just a dumb jock, who followed Glenn around like a puppy. He did what he did, hung on his every word, and probably would have held his hair while he vomited; at seventeen, Glenn already had his first "yes man". Behind their backs, they were often referred to as "Burns and Smithers", as the cartoon characters fit their personalities perfectly (although, to be fair, cartoon Smithers seemed smarter).

Adrian was Clark's half-brother, and as naturally sadistic as anyone she had ever had the misfortune to meet. If demons did exist, he must have been one, in spirit if not in flesh. He even had a face like a weasel, pinched and feral, like he was always planning something distasteful and quietly snickering about it. But to call him a weasel was an insult to weasels.

"Make yourself useful for once," Adrian snapped, shoving candles in Rajiv's hands. Rajiv bobbled them for a minute, then started setting them in the salt circle and lighting them.

In the book they took from her, Katy and Glenn had found a demon named Haggoth, who had supposedly been invoked by the wealthy and powerful in times past. Those who controlled Haggoth were guaranteed not only wealth and power - as those were the attributes of this particular demon - but eternal youth, as long as the demon was contained and constrained by its handlers. According to the book, Haggoth was both easy to invoke and easy to contain, as he wasn't the smartest demon on any planet. But Asha had read enough of these books to know that nothing was that easy; there was always a catch somewhere, and she knew Glenn and Katy weren't the most observant people in the world, so it was easy to imagine that they had overlooked something, some detail that would send everything off the rails.

Well, if any of this were true. It wasn't, so she had no idea why she was so nervous.

Maybe it was just being in a cemetery after dark. Stupid superstitious nonsense, but she could remember her parents telling her to never go in a graveyard after dark, no matter what, and she supposed it was ingrained in her now. (Why _had _they told her to avoid graveyards? Were they actually afraid she would get eaten by a vampire or something?)

Or it was being on church property. According to Adrian, who "knew some people", the Vicar of this particular church was gone for a couple of days, so there was no one looking after the grounds - well, supposedly. She didn't trust Adrian, nor did she trust that in this day and age, someone would leave property like this without security of some sort, even if it was just cameras, or a guy who drove by every once in a while.

But the ritual was apparently specific: it needed to be done in a graveyard, and fresh graveyard dirt was a key component. Why this dirt would be different from any other dirt she honestly had no idea. It probably just seemed spookier to write down than "some dust bunnies from under your bed".

Once the setting was complete - salt circle with six candles spaced a roughly even distance apart, and a seventh in the middle - Glenn told them, "Well, sit already."

"I am _not _sitting on salt," Katy insisted, "This is a McQueen skirt!"

Glenn sighed, and fixed her with a caustic stare. "Then take my bloody coat and sit on that." He tossed it to her, and she caught it before it smashed her in the face, but just barely. That earned him a dirty look from her in return, but she spread it over the salt and sat on it, crossing her legs so Adrian, Clark, and Rajiv didn't get a free peek at her knickers. (Who wore that short a skirt if they knew they were going to have to sit down?) She sat down between Katy and Rajiv, feeling that was the safest spot.

Glenn stood in the middle of the circle, besides the candle, and stripped off his shirt, revealing a chest he must have worked out weeks to get, dotted with a few scraggly strands of ginger hair. That was gross enough on its own, but made worse by the fact that the hair on his head was brown. Did he dye it? Katy would know, but there was no way in hell she was going to ask.

Adrian pulled what look like a night cream jar out of Glenn's backpack and grabbed a handful of grave dirt, although he only sprinkled some of the dirt in there before tossing the rest of it away, and pulling out a coffee stirrer straw to mix it into whatever was in the jar. After a moment, he held the jar up towards Glenn, saying, in an exaggerated Cockney accent, "Yer Bloody Mary, squire."

Katy wrinkled her nose like she smelled something bad. "What is that?"

"Part of the ritual," Glenn said, a leering grin splitting his face. "Blood and grave dirt."

"Eww," Katy exclaimed, her nose creasing even more in disgust.

"Hey, it was 'spose to be virgin blood," Glenn continued, dipping his finger into the jar and coming out with a small dark blob of mixture, which he smeared in a sloppy circle on the center of his forehead. "But we didn't know any, so we went with sheep's blood."

"We never asked Asha," Adrian said, giving her a cold look as he snickered.

She wanted to tell him to fuck off, but didn't dare.

"Where did you get sheep's blood?" Rajiv asked, suddenly looking apprehensive.

"You don't want to know, Hajji," Adrian replied, turning his scorn on him now. "Don't want'cha runnin' home to your Mum cryin', now do we?"

"Let's get this done," Glenn said impatiently, screwing the lid back on the jar and tossing it at Adrian. "Clark?"

Clark currently had the book in his lap, open to the page that Glenn had told him to open it to, finger under the paragraph that Glenn has said he had to read. "Umm, this language is weird …" he admitted hesitantly.

Glenn made a noise of exasperation. "Just sound it out then."

"Uh, okay." He cleared his throat nervously, and tried to hide his anxiety by giving the words gravitas, like he really knew what he was saying. "Nocens infensus phasmatis exaudio nostrum votum …"

She almost recognized the language, but not quite. It did sound kind of like Latin, though, but it could have been just the way he was pronouncing it.

As he droned on, she noticed Adrian scraping up the salt on one side of him, as if trying to make a salt man or a salt ball. She didn't know why, but she really thought that he shouldn't be doing that, that there was some logic to there being an unbroken circle. (How stupid was that? None of it was real.)

The flames of all the candles began to flicker in unison, a small wind seemingly kicking up around the edge of the circle, and the hair on her arms started to stand on end. But that was probably just the cold.

"Stop it," Katy hissed in Adrian's direction.

He looked at her blandly, but his cold eyes glittered like broken glass in a shallow pool. "Stop what?"

"What you're doing, you wanker."

In the center of the circle, Glenn stiffened and looked up towards the overcast sky, his arms thrusting out straight from his sides. "Oh, knock it off," Katy snapped. "You're not fooling anyone."

The wind seemed to whip up harder now, snuffing all the candles, as there was the slightest tremor in the ground beneath them. "I said knock it off, Adrian," she exclaimed, jumping to her feet.

The book slammed shut, and from the startled look on Clark's face, he didn't do that.

Glenn looked at her, and said, "Girl, did you just break the circle?" But it wasn't his voice that rumbled from his throat, and his eyes had a weird, yellowish glow to them.

Rajiv went pale as parchment, and asked, "H-how are you doing that?"

"This isn't funny anymore," Katy said, her face contorting in anger. "What do you think we are, in junior school? It's not even Halloween yet. Why don't you save it 'til then, see if you can get the five years olds to run screaming? I'm going home."

As she turned to go, something like panic burbled up in Asha's mind, a thought that was frantic and almost alien: - _can'tbreakthecircleit'llbelooseifsomeonebreaksthecircle - _so she reached to grab Katy, stop her …

But the second Katy's foot touched the ground outside the circle, Glenn held out his hand, and something shot out of it. No, not from it - something like yellowish light came out of Katy's body, straight out of her back and into his hand, somehow being absorbed by him.

Katy made a small noise, like a strangled whimper, and suddenly she was surrounded by a corona of energy, half black and half yellow, before it seemed to burn straight through her and leaped right towards Glenn. Katy's body collapsed to the ground, looking like a desiccated mummy dressed in designer clothes.

"Wicked," Adrian said, cackling.

Glenn pointed at him, and said, in his new funny voice, "You've broken it as well, boy." Adrian's eyes widened as he realized he was in trouble, but before he could move, that energy seemed to manifest, jump out of his body towards Glenn, and they could all see Adrian seemingly age a million years a second as it seemed the very life force was ripped out of him in a bright burst of energy.

"What the fuck is going on?" Clark exclaimed, almost screaming.

Asha broke out of her paralysis, and grabbed the arm of Rajiv, who was staring in abject horror at whatever Glenn had become - or whatever was inside him. She knew something had gone wrong here, several things had gone wrong, but the end result was a worse case scenario straight out of a horror movie. She shook Rajiv's arm until she got his attention, and when he looked at her, she said, firmly but quietly, "Run."

"What the fuck is this?!" Clark was now yelling at the demon Glenn. He stood up and threw the book at his feet. "You said you'd share!"

She climbed to her feet, tugging Rajiv up with her, and they both ran headlong through the small cemetery, not looking back to see what the demon was doing to Clark, and not really caring.

What a way to prove that only were her parents not at all crazy, but she was for not believing them, even after death.

She wondered how soon she would be joining them, and how many others would be going along for the ride.

* * *

2

He looked out the window, and saw that the landscape was blanketed in pure white snow. It was flawless, a soft layer of white not unlike icing, giving everything a silence that could have been eerie, but wasn't.

Logan put his hand against the lightly frosted pane of glass as he looked out at the back yard, and the thin layer of snow coating the otherwise empty branches of the cherry tree close to the house. He could see the tiny imprints of bird tracks, and wondered, if he concentrated, if he'd be able to name the specific kinds of birds that had been there. Then again, why would he want to?

Mariko came up behind him and looked out, wrapping her arms around his waist and resting her head against his shoulder. "Ah, winter," she sighed. "I missed this during college."

"Really?"

""Yeah. Southern California doesn't have seasons, just three temperatures: tepid - which is what passes for winter - warm, and hot. Endless summer was fun for the first five months, then it got tired."

"This is just home to me. I'm not sure snow will ever be a novelty."

"Oh yes, it's always snowing in Canada, isn't it?" She teased, her hair soft against his skin. "Snowing and full of rutting moose and flying hockey pucks."

"Better than rutting hockey pucks and flying moose."

"Okay, that's a point." She leaned against him, her body a pleasant warm contrast to the cold glass against his palm, and the silence of the snow seemed to join them, fill up their small and strange home, but it was a comfortable silence, each lost in their own specific thoughts. He wasn't always sure what she was thinking, but that was kind of refreshing. She could be thinking about what she wanted for breakfast, if she wanted French toast with regular maple syrup or that huckleberry syrup she had imported from the States, or if she was thinking about how she'd be able to legitimize Yashida Industries for the Nikkei Index. Sometimes he worried that she would figure out she could do way better than him, but she must have done that long before now, and decided to shrug it off. He hoped she continued to do that, because he knew it would destroy him if he lost her. God, what was wrong with him? He used to be better than this; he used to be able to keep his feelings totally locked away. There were times when he wondered if he had any left at all, and now he wondered if he'd let them take him over completely. "What is it?"

"Huh?" He didn't know why he started to drift away there for a moment. Considering he was supposed to be a bodyguard, that was a real snafu.

"You had that pensive face again."

"I have a pensive face? Is there a cure for that?"

She gave him a small slap on the arm, little more than a love tap. "Don't play dumb, Mr. "I-read-Russian-novels-in-Russian". You know what I mean."

"I don't."

"Pardon me?"

"I don't read Russian novels. With a few exceptions, most are breathtakingly ponderous. I prefer Russian poetry. Much more direct."

She sighed dramatically, and let her head sag against his arm like she was about to pass out. "What am I going to do with you?"

"Can I offer some suggestions?"

"No." Her hand slid down his back, and he realized that it had suddenly turned cold. That wasn't a surprise, as, save for during the summer, Mariko always seemed to have cold hands and cold feet. Just one of those things. "Can I ask you something, Logan?"

"Sure." He felt something warm and liquid crawling down his arm, and realized she was crying. Why? And why was she doing it so quietly?

But when she looked up at him, he saw she wasn't crying - or at least, not yet. She was bleeding from her nose and ears, blood oozing from the corners of her mouth, and as he watched, tears of blood started trickling from her eyes, leaving dark crimson trails down her cheeks. "Why did you kill me?"

Logan woke up, swallowing back something that could have been a scream or maybe a groan; he didn't know. It just tasted sour and felt hard, like a clot of gristle in his throat. He turned over on his side and blinked back tears, his solar plexus tensing like a fist. It was just a nightmare, right? That's all it was, it didn't mean anything.

(So why did he almost feel something like déjà vu?)

"Who's Mariko?" Srina muttered into her pillow.

"What?"

"Mariko. I think that's what you said."

Had he talked in his sleep? Oh fuck, what was he thinking? He screamed in his sleep; talking would actually be an improvement.

"I just … " he sat up, keeping his back to her. He still wasn't sure he could speak about her to anyone, even Srina. "It's not … "

"Old girlfriend?"

"Yeah, something like that," he admitted, and quickly got up and left the bedroom, padding out to the living room. He meant to hit the bathroom, but fuck it, he needed to get some distance and gather his thoughts for a moment. Dreams with Mariko in them shook him to his core, almost as much as remembering what the Organization had done to him. The only difference was emotional pain over physical, although in psychic pain, they seemed about even.

He felt that typical sense of dislocation before remembering he was supposed to be in Srina's London flat, where the traffic noise seemed to loiter just outside the window, an erratic stream of white noise based purely on the repetitive hiss of tire treads on asphalt. He was heading for the kitchen to grab a beer - he _really _needed a beer - when a hint of blood reached his nose and made him stop.

He was naked, so a quick glance down confirmed he wasn't bleeding, and the thought that he was still smelling something from his dream (her blood?) occurred to him just as he looked around the room, scanning the carpet, and found something unusual.

There was a note sticking under the crack of Srina's front door. A note smeared with Human blood.


	2. Part 2

He strained his senses trying to determine if there was anyone behind the door, waiting for someone to get close, but he didn't hear anything, didn't smell anything beyond the blood and the lingering scent of must from the bookshop downstairs. Still, he kept his right arm cocked back as he reached down and snagged the note, ready to pop his claws at a moment's notice. But he was hit by a sense of déjà vu again, this time of reading a bloody note. When?

Oh, right, Yasha's place. Suddenly, he knew had left this note, but he wasn't at all comforted by the knowledge.

"What time is it?" Srina called sleepily from the bedroom.

He glanced at the clock, and then, surprised at what it said, glanced at the DVD clock. Yep, that was the right time. Damn. "It's noon. We slept in late." He went to the kitchen, tearing open the pale pink, marble patterned envelope,

"Are you putting the kettle on?"

"No."

"Yes you are," she replied, and made it sound like a warning.

He sighed, and when he got in the kitchen, picked up the silver tea kettle to make sure there was enough water in it. There was, so he just put it on a burner and turned on the stove. He then leaned against the counter and pulled out a single sheet of pink marbled stationary, where the words were written in elegant script, and the "ink" was Human blood. It read, simply and cryptically: '_L - Tonight, sundown, the Velvet Cudgel. - H.'_

Hashim. He didn't know which was more troublesome - that he continued to use Human blood to write notes, or that he knew where Srina lived.

"Where's a place called the Velvet Cudgel?" He shouted, folding the note and putting it back in the envelope before ripping it into several pieces and tossing it in the garbage can she had under the sink.

It took Srina a moment, and he could hear her moving around in the bedroom, getting up, slipping on her robe. "Uh … you mean the goth S&M club? That's in Southwark, I think, down from Butler's Wharf. Why? You wanna be spanked with a cricket bat?"

"Not particularly, no." Other side of the Thames. That wasn't his home turf, was it, or had he expanded his home turf of Mayfair while he was gone? It was possible that the Three Dragons were his only real competition in the gangster business, and with them out of the way, he could expand his empire. He didn't think Hashim was bad, as far as vampires went, but he wasn't good either, and he clearly had a taste for power. Logan knew there was a possibility that he would have to kill him eventually, even though he had helped him kill Kali. The problem was, at the end of the day, he was not only a vampire but a gangster vampire, and a shrewd one at that. He would do what he had to do to consolidate his power, to keep a stranglehold on it, from killing gods to killing people. And the stronger he got, the fewer beings that could successfully take him on. He knew, right from the beginning, that he would probably have to betray him, but Hashim probably expected as much - after all, why had he bothered to discover where Logan stayed while in London? Betrayal was inevitable in this scenario; it wasn't so much no honor among thieves as no honor among species that were at war with one another. At the end of the day, vampires were lethal parasites, and Humans were prey. One would kill the other, not necessarily because they wanted to, but because they had to. Humans saw vampires as evil, and vampires found Humans to be delicious, even without ketchup - there was no way to build a peaceful coalition.

The water started to boil and he turned the burner heat down before opening the refrigerator and getting himself a beer. So why did Hashim want to see him? Was this a set up, the inevitable assassination attempt, or did he just want to talk? He wouldn't know until he got there, he supposed.

But Hashim was no fool. He'd seen him fighting, he knew about the claws, he knew about the connection to Bob. He wouldn't make a move unless he was sure he could beat him.

He wasn't going to worry about it. After all, name dropping the Sisters would probably be enough to make him lose confidence in any plan he had.

* * *

Srina was right about the club being in the Southwark section of London, but it was still hard to find, as it didn't advertise itself like a normal club. It was on a block full of rustic brick lined buildings, mostly quaint shops and pubs that tourists would find endearing, but at the end of the block was a boarded up pub - it looked fire scorched - with a sign out front reading "The Swan and Rose". Beneath it was a small, hot pink arrow, pointing towards a narrow service alley besides the former pub. Following the alley, you'd come to a small building with a heavy metal door, and a hand painted sign reading the Velvet Cudgel; he could hear the thudding bass of music about five meters from the entrance.

He opened the door, and was assailed by Type O Negative's song "Black Number One", possibly the most metal inclined goth song in existence.

The club was dark as hell, although not as hot, and lit sporadically with red, blue, and green spotlights that looked as if they were trying to mimic blood and decaying flesh, the colors of corrosion. The place was pretty full considering it wasn't even seven yet, and most people were wearing leather and vinyl, PVC or spandex, even if it didn't suit them. He saw one man with chains like leashes attached to his nipple rings, which were exposed because he wasn't wearing a shirt. Did Hashim really like places like this? Or was he just here to snicker at the Human poseurs, who had no idea what real sadism was?

"Col, I was wonderin' when you were gonna show up," a man with a thick Scottish burr said behind him. Even before he got a look at him, he knew it was Scott, the Asian Scottish vampire, one of Hashim's men. "I hate these fuckin' cunts. Sweaty leather smells like 'orse's bollocks."

He was tempted to ask how he knew what horse's balls smelled like, but Scott - much like the American Scott he knew - didn't seem to have much in the way of a sense of humor. Maybe it was a hallmark of the name. "Where's Hashim?"

The young vamp - couldn't have been more than eighteen when turned - jerked his head towards the shadowy back of the club. "Private room. 'e don't like the riff-raff." Without further comment he started leading the way, elbowing and shouldering aside anyone who didn't move fast enough to get out of his way. Curiously, there weren't a lot of protests about this, possibly because they came here specifically to be manhandled, and Scott was just giving them a freebie.

There were several back rooms, and even if he didn't hear the slap of a whip on bare flesh, it was pretty obvious what they were for. One room had an open door, and inside was what looked to be some variation of a medieval torture rack. Cute. It all seemed very quaint compared to the contemporary dungeons of the Organization.

Scott headed for the second closed door before the end of the hall, on the left, and knocked on it twice before opening it up. Perhaps that was just a sign that it was expected company as opposed to unexpected. "'e's 'ere," Scott said unnecessarily, holding the door open for Logan.

Hashim was seated at a table in the center of the room, a steel goblet set off to one side. On the back wall, shackles dangled flaccid and empty, while a locked cabinet full of riding crops and shorter whips waited to be used. It looked like there were thumb screws and nipple clamps in there as well, which made him seriously worry about the Human race. Maybe the demons had the right idea.

"Thank you for coming, Logan," Hashim said, oddly British in his politeness. "I'm sure hearing from me was a shock."

"It was … unexpected."

"Leave us," Hashim said to Scott, who was still holding open the door.

He rolled his eyes and made a strange, rude noise. "An' go out there? C'mon …"

"Maybe you'll find an interesting wannabe."

"There are never any interestin' wannabes," he protested, but he obeyed his boss and headed out, closing the door behind him.

"Wannabe?" Logan wondered, taking the only remaining seat in the room. There was only him and Hashim, but this was meant to be a beating area, not a conference room.

Hashim, as always, was a picture of elegance, a lean, dark man in a wine dark leather driving coat, his high cheekbones and sloe eyes setting off the tribal scarring on his face, making it look curiously artistic. His demeanor was measured and calm, a paragon of serenity, an ironic counterpoint to his demonic nature. "Humans who wish to become vampires. They think we come to places like these - they are unaware of the demon bars, usually - and hope to meet us, so they can be "made"." He sighed, a slender hand wrapping around the goblet full of goat's blood. "I blame Anne Rice. If she would just stop putting out those bloody stupid novels of hers, we'd all be happier."

"The wannabes that bad?"

"Worse than you could possibly imagine. They think they can be undead rock stars, forever young and pretty, and swanning about with the beautiful people. They know nothing of what it's really like, and aren't prepared for it. They're sad, pathetic little children who think they will be instantly loved or feared once they become one of us."

"So what d'ya do? I can't imagine you talkin' 'em out of it."

"No, but we have no interest in changing them either. They're whiney little brats who are inevitably disappointed."

"So what do you do to 'em?"

"Mostly scare them away. Apparently we don't resemble Tom Cruise in our demon faces. Thank god."

Logan suspected there was more to it than that, that maybe they occasionally made a snack of these poor deluded people, but he decided not to push. Besides, if you asked a vampire to bite you and they did, wasn't that simply suicide? If you rubbed your arm with bacon and dared a dog to bite, was it its fault if it actually did? It wasn't the animal's fault if you goaded it to make a meal out of you. "So why am I here?"

Hashim gave him the smallest of smiles. "You are never one for foreplay, are you?"

"Not in a sex dungeon, no."

He sipped from his cup of blood, then set it aside once more. "Something odd is going on in the city."

"It's London. There's always somethin' odd going on. This place, for example."

"It's killing my people."

Logan shook his head and glanced at the shackles on the wall, wondering how long they'd hold him before he broke the flimsy connecting chain. "Y'know, it's nothing personal at all, but so fucking what? So there's a vampire hunter in town - you can't take care of them eventually, or simply move?"

"It's not a vampire hunter. They usually don't dismember their prey before killing them."

"Dismember? How do you know that's happened?"

"Here's a fun fact. If you lop off a body part of a vampire that is not its head, it usually remains intact even if the vampire itself turns to dust. A withered, corpse limb is left behind. Of course, it decomposes much faster than a regular limb, which is one way you can tell it's from a vampire …"

"So you've been finding rapidly decomposing limbs of your people?"

"Yes. A leg here, an arm there, sometimes a whole set. It's very curious. The Weird Sisters aren't with you, by any chance?"

Oh yes, the famous dismemberers. "Not that I know of, although I don't even try and keep track of those weirdoes. Still, why would they rip your people to pieces? Did you piss them off?"

He shook his head. "No, but considering their reputation, I didn't think that was a prerequisite."

"Well … put it that way …" he considered that a moment, but then shook his head. "If they were around, they'd let me know. They live to annoy the shit outta me. And you don't think they're doing, or you would have sent me a note simply asking me to tell them to stop."

Hashim's eyes were dark mirrors, giving him nothing, but he knew that he was being judged. Hashim didn't seem to find him wanting, though. "It's always refreshing to talk to you. You're never as unintelligent as you seem."

"And you ain't too bad for a bloodsucking motherfucker. Can we just get to the point? Why do you think I'd care about something killing your people, even if it is tearing them apart like Christmas crackers?"

"Because my people aren't the only ones on the menu." He reached down and picked up a small stack of papers, which he plopped down on the table before him.

They were newspaper articles, some entire pages, going back about five days. They were all about missing children, or children found dead from cryptically described "homicidal violence", ranging from the East End to Hampton Court; the youngest - one of the missing - was thirteen; the oldest - most of the dead, in fact - was seventeen. "Mercy, one of my people, actually stumbled upon one of the corpses on an errand," Hashim said, taking hold of his goblet of blood. "She said the life was stolen from it; it looked like a mummy in FUBU."

Where had he come across something similar? Oh shit - the lamia. "Desiccated? I killed the lamia queen; I didn't think any could get through."

Hashim shook his head. "You misunderstand me. They weren't desiccated - their youth was taken away. They died of rapid onset old age. I'd say they were probably about two hundred years old, and since a normal Human body breaks down at a hundred and twenty years, you can imagine how nasty that is."

He waited for him to add a droll "_I'm joking, of course," _but he didn't. He was dead serious, no pun intended. "Wait … you're saying something aged them?"

"Well, yes. Or took the time they were supposed to have; took away their years of life, presumably to feed their own."

"But the paper says homicidal violence."

"The trauma of massive, rapid aging makes them look like they've been tromped on by an elephant. Mercy said she thought she stepped on an area rug at first."

"What demon could do this?"

"Now that I'm not sure. But it wouldn't be above a sorcerer, or someone who cut a deal with some type of energy sucking demon."

"Have you talked to Camilla?"

"She's been in Wales, I'm afraid. I expect her back tomorrow, though. But the strangeness doesn't end there."

Logan glared at him, wondering when this was going to stop. "Of course it doesn't."

"Ghita and I were almost attacked by a werewolf in Hyde Park last night. Luckily, faced with two vampires, it turned tail and ran away rather than try anything."

He shrugged, not getting it. "So? Werewolves aren't allowed outside the dog runs?"

"Was last night a full moon?"

Logan was about to get up and storm out, tired of this bullshit, when he suddenly remembered seeing the moon last night, as he and Srina were walking back from that Vietnamese restaurant. It was a bright, white crescent above the streetlight … _crescent_ _moon_. "No, no it wasn't. Is that a hard and fast rule? That werewolves can only come out on full moons?"

"As far as I know, yes. I've only ever seen them about on full moons, so you can imagine my surprise."

Logan considered this all, rubbing his forehead, as there was something off about all of this. "Wait a second - how does all of this connect? Someone rapidly aging kids; someone tearing up vamps; werewolves out before the full moon. What makes you think they're connected?"

He put his goblet back down, shoving it aside, his brown furrowing in what seemed to be genuine concern. "The power is starting to shift. You can feel it - well, no, _we_ can feel it. Something has suddenly appeared, big enough to upset the balance, and no one seems to know what or why. All we know is it's powerful, and it's rapidly gaining ground. The thing is, it won't only swallow the undead population; it will swallow your people as well. I thought that might be of interest to you."

Logan glanced at the news clippings, wondering why it was kids. Because they had the most lives left? Then why not hit toddlers - they had even more life left. (Maybe that was next … ) "So why dump this on me? Why not try and solve this yourself?"

He patiently ticked off the reasons on his slender fingers. "Because I need help. Because you are the messenger of Lady Blood, and she probably has resources I do not. Because you have some connection to the gods, some of whom might be interested in this turn of events. Because there is no one else I trust not to try and exploit this turn of events to their own advantage."

He tried to read between the lines, figure out what Hashim was not saying, but he reluctantly came to the conclusion that he was probably being honest. That, all by itself, was a little frightening. Vampires weren't supposed to be vulnerable, at least not to things that weren't sunshine or wood. Logan sighed, and said, "I'll see what I can do."

But where to start? It wasn't like he knew any demon experts to help him if Camilla was out of town.

Or, wait a minute. Maybe he did.

3

It didn't take long, which was a plus.

It actually took him longer to find the secret, off-site Watcher library, as last time he'd just been teleported to it. But he knew it was somewhere in Tooting, and he remembered the surrounding buildings and streets. The library was "disguised" - if you could call it that - as a boarded up, abandoned building with several different hazard signs plastered around. The thing was, the boarded up door was actually a façade; there was nothing but bricks beneath, and the same was true of the windows. He put a hand against the mild but tangible magic field around the building and walked around it, trying to pick up the feeling of a gap or a weakness. He found a place where it lessened, where it was barely in existence, and found it appeared to be a solid brick wall. He pushed his hand against it, and while it seemed solid at first, eventually it gave, his arm sliding through the illusion like it was wet tar. He pushed his way through, fighting the resistance, until he fell through into the dark, musty library, ending up face first on the dusty grey carpet.

After sneezing a few times, he realized he wasn't alone. "Just me, Anna," he said to the resident ghost librarian. "From last time, with the vamp Watcher, remember?"

A book thumped on a rustic wooden table, and he took that as a yes. "There's something weird going on out there, and I need your help." There was nothing but dead silence, but he could sense her hovering about. Waiting for more? Perhaps, so he went on. "I need to find a Watcher, but I don't know that much about her. Her name is Ruby, and she's a werewolf. That's all I know; I don't even know if she survived that whole explosion thing. Is there any way you might know who she is, or where she is if she survived?"

A breeze passed by him, trailing the faintest scent of crushed and stale flowers. He heard rustling deeper in the maze of the library, things being removed and replaced on shelves, and finally a slim book came hovering down the aisle before dropping on the wooden table, the book opening by itself and pages ruffling by rapidly as he climbed to his feet and walked to the table, careful to keep his distance. He didn't know if ghosts considered it rude for people to walk through them, or through the space that they occupied in theory, but he figured it was better safe than sorry.

The book spun around and slid across the table towards him. He saw that it was some kind of employment roster, a sort of Watcher's yearbook. There was her name in the center of the page, Ruby Von Allmen, with a street address, and a line under "Notes" that read: '_Bitten by werewolf during mission, 07/15/89'_. That had to be her. "Thank you, Anna," he said, memorizing the address, and trying to ignore the fact that nearly every name on the page, above and below hers, had in the notations area '_killed in action' _or '_missing_' . This included Wesley at the very bottom of the page, except his note listed the date of his "expulsion" before listing his date of death. But since it happened just recently, and after the deaths of so many Watchers, how did it get in the book?

He suddenly had the most curious thought. "You did this, didn't you?" he asked the air, which was Anna. "You keep track of everyone, don't you?"

No answer, but why did he expect one? "Still the bookkeeper, after all this time. Well, I guess everyone needs a hobby, huh?"

A small, answering knock sounded throughout the library. It might have seemed morbid, but hell, when you were already dead, what wasn't?

Shit - what a weird, weird life he led.

* * *

Ruby lived outside of London proper, and in one of the rural outskirts, which allowed her to have a quaint little storybook cottage and surrounding grounds running riot with flowers: pink candytufts and bright orange marigolds, purple foxgloves, tangles of roses in blood red and snow white behind spiky blue delphiniums and bright yellow daisies. The smell made him sneeze even before he opened the tiny white gate to her yard. A light glowed yellow in two windows, so somebody was home, but he had no idea if it was actually Ruby.

He was half way up the cobblestone path when he realized that even if it was her who was home, if werewolves were changing no matter the phases of the moon, she could be one of them. Looking up, he saw the bright white segment of the moon, lighting his path and perhaps mocking him in the subtlest way. Shit. Well, if she had wolfed out, he could deal with it - werewolves weren't that hard to knock out, and they didn't seem to like being cut, even if you weren't using silver.

Reluctantly, he knocked on the door, and waited, ready to pop his claws, listening hard for dog like panting or the much more obvious lupine howling. But he didn't hear it, or catch a single whiff of dog breath, as locks were undone and the door opened a crack. Ruby stared out at him with a single eye, blue and cold, over her sharp, aquiline nose, her lips a thin, taut line. "Oh, you," she said curtly.

"Yeah, hi. List -" Before he could finish his explanation, she closed the door on him. "Hey!" He could hear her start throwing locks again, so he pounded on the door. "I could break it down, you know!"

"And I could bite you," she snapped back through the door. "What the hell do you want?"

"There's some weird shit going on, and I need your help. I wouldn't be here if it wasn't important, or if I had anyone else to turn to."

He waited a moment, giving her a chance to think about it. "Is this about what's happening in London?"

Oh snap. "You know about that? What d'ya know?"

She started undoing the locks once more, and finally opened the door, just wide enough to let him in. She was wearing navy blue sweat pants and a long sleeved black sweatshirt, her coffee brown hair cut into a severe pageboy. She looked a little dishelmed and slightly weary, but even so, it did nothing to soften her rock hard edges. She was like the schoolmarm from hell, even without the monthly lycanthropy thrown in. "The portents are very ugly," she said, and he supposed that was an answer, just not a helpful one. "Something powerful has set up camp. I don't suppose you had anything to do with it, did you?"

"No." He stepped inside and she shut the door behind him, throwing a deadbolt possibly out of habit. The inside of her home smelled like a chicken t.v. dinner, wine, and green tea incense, and in her sitting room, he saw a small table with a circle of votive candles in clear glass holders burning away, surrounding what appeared to be a tiny, random pile of dried bones, rune stones, and dried leaves. He pointed at it, and asked, "Spell?"

She shrugged, a look of irritation flashing across her face. "Simple protection circle. Now what is it you want?"

"Information. What can make a werewolf change before a full moon?"

She had started to walk back to her living room, where the BBC news was playing on mute like a silently unfolding tragedy, but froze as if he'd just smacked her on the ass. The look she gave him could have given someone without a healing factor frostbite. "Why are you asking?"

"'Cause there was one runnin' around Hyde Park last night, and hell, could be there tonight. I haven't swung by yet."

"Are you certain it was a werewolf?"

"It was identified as such by two vamps, who I think are gonna know a werewolf when they see one. Supernatural creatures seem to just know each other, don't they?"

Considering how her eyes narrowed, she really didn't appreciate the joke. "How did you find me?"

"Anna Harkness."

Now she looked really confounded. He was just going to guess that the last few months had been hard on her, and it showed on her face. Couldn't he sympathize? It was often difficult to be one of the lone survivors of something, no matter what it was. "How on Earth do you know her? That Bob again?"

She said his name like it left a bad taste in his mouth "No. Camilla introduced me. Vamp Camilla. Know her? Used to be one of you."

"Oh yes, the quitter," she said derisively, walking away. She sat in an armchair, where a brandy snifter full of a ruby red liquid awaited her on a side table. She took a big swallow of it before adding, "We all have to die sometime. You'd think us Watchers would accept death a bit more gracefully than most."

He'd heard that story. Camilla was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and rather than go through treatments that were on par with the disease, she simply set out to find a vampire that would turn her into one of them. Logan didn't feel he could judge her, as he knew he would probably never be in such a position. Besides, he knew that everyone made rash decisions that they occasionally lived to regret. "You haven't answered my question," he pointed out. He could have sat down on her loveseat, but he decided he'd rather stand. He didn't think she'd allow him to be here long anyways.

"Which? Do supernatural creatures know each other?"

It was his turn to give her an acidic look. "No, about werewolves. You don't want to tell me, do you?" Suddenly he had a very suspicious, paranoid thought - but hadn't his paranoia always served him well? "Where were you last night, Ruby? Not Hyde Park, was it?"


	3. Part 3

Ruby scowled at him, swirling wine inside her snifter. "It's none of your business where I was - I'm MI-5 on top of being A Watcher. Ex-Watcher. But I wasn't in Hyde Park, and I resent the implication."

He studied her, finding it a little difficult to parse all the smells in this odiferous place. But then he noticed that undercurrent feral smell, the smell of the wolf she gave off even in her unaltered state, mingled with the cloying scent of the incense. And it occurred to him like a smack in the back of the head. God, he was an idiot sometimes. (Well, most of the time, but he wasn't about to point that out.) "Protection circle. Holy shit, that spell's to prevent you from changing, isn't it?"

Her frosty blue eyes narrowed even further, almost disappearing into her angular face. "What?"

"Look, darlin', I don't care; I don't even care if it was you runnin' around the park last night. All I care about is finding this thing and stopping it before it kills more kids."

Her posture stiffened, her jaw growing taut. "Kids? There were kids killed in the park last night?"

"No, no, this is a separate thing." And even though he wanted information from her, he decided to extend a little trust to her - even though it was far from warranted - and told her what Hashim had told him, and from what he gathered from scanning the news reports. After he finished telling her what little he knew, he added, "This is why I came to you, Ruby. You have the knowledge and experience with big bad evil forces that I don't. I can fight demons - I've fought and killed a hell of a lot - but I don't have the encyclopedic knowledge that I need. You're a Watcher - were a Watcher - and I bet you do."

Her look continued to be wary and scathing, skirting the edge of contemptuous. "I've no doubt of your ability to kill, _Wolverine_" - the emphasis on his code name was dripping with acid and malice - "But using evil things to fight even more evil things isn't generally a sound idea."

Okay, that hurt, but he didn't let it show on his face. He didn't want her to know she had drawn blood with that comment. "I am not evil. Didn't you read those files you pulled for me on the Chimera case? Maybe they didn't spell it out for you, but I was brainwashed. I wasn't working for the Organization under my own conscious volition."

She made a noise of doubt, a sort of muffled "harrumph". "As if it's as easy to brainwash people as popular fiction would have you believe."

"It is when telepaths fuck your brain over to the point where you don't even know who you are, and leave your brain the consistency of mush."

Her look remained dubious. "It's not that easy to be an assassin - a good assassin - either. It's not something your garden variety psychopath can do. You have to be patient, you have to be emotionally distant if not completely dead; you have to see your prey as inhuman, and you have to be inhuman yourself. You have to be a special breed to kill without a conscience. Are you claiming you're the lone exception to the rule?"

"No. But if I was so fuckin' evil, why haven't I gone on a killing spree? Why are you still alive?"

Her smile was small and bitter. "I'm a werewolf. Give it your best shot."

"Werewolves can't live without a head," he shot back. "Look, I don't care if you think I am some sort of cold blooded bagman - I'm looking to shut this thing down. Are you with me or not?"

She shifted in her arm chair, folding her legs beneath her, not bothering to hide her general resentment. "I can't believe you're aligned with the Powers, I really can't."

"Who said I'm aligned with the Powers?"

"The champion list is open, and for some reason, you're the odds on favorite. Due to Bob, I suppose. Once touched, always touched."

He threw up his hands is frustration. "Is there a newsletter on this shit I'm missin'?"

"Probably."

"I'm not the Powers' champion or bitch or whatever the fuck, okay? That's Angel's shit, not mine, whether he's in this dimension or not. Can we stick to the point - help me. Yes or no?"

She glared at him for almost a full minute before sighing and rolling her eyes. "I suppose it wouldn't hurt to keep an eye on you."

"Great. Do you have a date, or do you want to come to Hyde Park with me?"

He was so accustomed to her distain now he hardly noticed she was giving him an evil look. He was inured to the fact that she would always give him a dirty look. She thought he was a stone cold mutie assassin, no matter the extenuating circumstances; he was a killer, and she would never let him forget it. "I'll need to get dressed, and dig out the amulet of Mharaka, so you might want to have a seat. But touch anything and I will break your fingers."

"Yer welcome to try," he drawled, trying not to smirk at the fact that she didn't know about his adamantium. But she must have, right? Maybe they just thought his claws were metal, and nothing else; biomechanical knives alone, not a laced skeleton. "Amulet of Mharaka? Does that give you some special powers or somethin'?"

"No. It just keeps me from … changing."

He raised an eyebrow at that, feeling just a bit superior. Yeah, he'd guessed right.

"To answer your previous question … yes, a werewolf can change without a full moon, under a couple of very specific circumstances. If they've learned a special meditation ritual that allows them to keep the change from happening on full moons, they must keep emotionally calm and neutral at all times, or strong emotions will trigger the change, day or night, full moon or not. It has a ninety nine point nine failure rate, and it's rather rigorous, so not a lot of lycanthropes know about it or bother. Two, the presence of a great evil can draw the demon side out, as can some very specific curses, but for those to work you need to know your victim is a werewolf, and you need to have some of their blood. Blood magic is the most powerful."

"So, in all these cases, we're dealing with a limited possibility."

"Yes. And the scales tip in favor of a great evil; it's the most plausible explanation."

"Is that why the protection spell, the amulet? Are you feeling the pull?"

She left without saying anything, radiating distaste. But as he was starting to watch the silent movie of the television, disaster footage of a part of the world he could identify on sight, even though he had no memory of ever being there, he heard her coming out again. She hadn't changed clothes at all, she just ducked out to toss him a gun, which he caught without any trouble. But it wasn't a normal gun; it was a bit bigger and a bit lighter, and didn't smell of gunpowder - it smelled of ketamine. "Drug gun?" It sounded like a question, but it wasn't really.

"In case the amulet doesn't work," she said, disappearing into the back bedroom.

High doses of ketamine would put a werewolf down? Well, you learned something new every day.

4

He only realized how much he thought of the Professor like a father when he was mad at him.

And the Professor was pretty damn well pissed off when he returned to the mansion with Rogue and Saddiq. They were fine, he was just angry that he would put them in danger, and rightfully so; Scott felt it wasn't his shining moment either. It was an asshole Logan thing to do, not like him at all.

The kids were quick to jump to his defense, Rogue arguing that she wanted to go, and she was pretty much old enough to do as she pleased, and they weren't her parents (the petulant teen argument; not the strongest), while Saddiq simply told him he'd have gone after them whether he had permission or not (the scary "_I was trained as a killing machine, remember?" _argument, that was much more frightening than Rogue's, and served to remind him that he had to do whatever it took to keep Logan from being a role model to him). The kids were grounded and assigned extra studies, which Rogue loathed openly, but Saddiq took it all stoically, as he took all things. And people said he never loosened up? Had they met this kid? He was seventeen going on fifty.

The Professor couldn't punish Scott like he punished the kids, but they had a couple of heated arguments, where Scott really didn't know what he was arguing for. He found himself in the hideous position of defending a point that Logan had made: doing nothing would not make the Organization leave them alone, nor make them go away. They did have to do something. Was that it? Maybe not, but the Sisters and Helga had at least scared the living shit out of them, and maybe that was worth a little breathing room. Xavier insisted there was a better way, so Scott asked him for clarification. What? What hadn't they done to discourage those goddamn people? It gave him the chance to remind him that it was Magneto who saved his ass from some early version of it, and as soon as he brought it up he felt horrible. Why had he said that? Why was he rubbing salt in the Professor's wounds?

Xavier saved him. He knew that, he respected that, he would take a bullet for him; there was no doubt in Scott's mind about any of that. But since coming back he hadn't felt right; he felt like he was going to jump out of his skin half the time. Not out of fear, but out of rage.

He was angry. He had never been this angry in his entire life, and he hated it. He felt like he was going to lose control eventually, fly off the handle, and he didn't want to. He spent more time tearing out engines and rebuilding them, sparring alone in the gym, trying to pick up the slack in the physical self-defense class since Logan wasn't around to teach it. (He eventually gave it up to Saddiq, whose fighting knowledge was just as encyclopedic as Logan's, and better actually, because Saddiq was more into legitimate martial arts styles as opposed to Logan's weird jumble of street fighting, kickboxing, ultimate fighting, and a haphazard collection of various martial arts and knife fighting styles. He had to admit it was effective, and probably was better for improvising, but it had no obvious discipline, and damn if these kids didn't need some. Logan did too, come to think of it.)

But the worst part, the very worst, was the dreams.

Or nightmares, or cries for help, or whatever they were, perhaps a slapdash mix of a little of everything, like Logan's fighting style. Jean was hurting, she needed help, and he knew Bob was somehow responsible for this, if not the inquisitor in charge of the whole thing. His first suspicion that these were indeed cries for help was the simple fact that he couldn't find Bob at all.

The internet was a wonderful place sometimes, with the good almost outweighing the bad. For instance, he might be in New York, but he could look up the addresses and telephone numbers of places in Los Angeles and Sydney in a second … if the places existed. But he could find no listing for a Way Station bar in Los Angeles, nor a listing for a single person surnamed Oberon in the Sydney area. He could understand Bob's unfortunate family wanting to keep their numbers unlisted, but _all _of them? Even Bob, who didn't seem to give a shit about anything? It was suspicious.

Xavier was sure he had a phone number around somewhere for the bar - he couldn't remember if Bob had left it, Logan had, or maybe he had written it down for future reference - but when he asked why he wanted it, Scott lied and said he wanted to make sure Helga was okay, since she got a bit injured at Mirror Lake. It was a lie, of course, and he hated himself for it, but for some reason he didn't want to tell him the truth. Was it because Jean was his, she was asking for his help, and he didn't want to let her down? Because he didn't want Xavier to talk him out if it? Because … well, he didn't know. He didn't know anything except he had to find a way to do this alone. But how did you attack a man of god like powers, a man who could in fact be a genuine god? (He still found it hard to believe. That, and after they kicked you out, or whatever they did to him, weren't you automatically demoted?) If Jean somehow now found herself defenseless against him, what hope did he have?

But that's where Logan actually said something once that made a lot of sense. It was to the kids, in one of the few self-defense classes he ever taught: _'Everything has a weakness. Everything. You may have to work to find it, but it's there. Nothing's perfectly invulnerable.' _And neither was Bob. He'd been laid low before, hadn't he? Almost killed. Being semi-divine hadn't been enough to spare him. Now it was his turn to find an Achilles heel in the supposedly unbeatable.

Xavier did find the bar's number, and he called it, actually getting Helga. According to her, Bob was still off in another dimension, and she had no idea what he was up to, except it was 'Some kinda god shit." Wasn't that in line what Bob said in his first nightmare? _"This is god business …"_

It was coincidence. It was chance and he was reading too much into it. He told himself that, and tried to believe it, but he found himself unable to do it. And the dreams were getting worse, more desperate; he often woke up with a pounding head ache.

Well, it was either the dreams or the cold. He seemed to have come down with a mild but irritating bug, one that wasn't too debilitating but never quite went away. It was so bad he actually took some cold medicine, even though he generally eschewed medicine unless it was absolutely necessary. And he was glad when he did, because it gave him dreamless sleep. But then again, he worried that Jean was trying to contact him and he was out of reach, so he didn't do it often.

He wanted to chew out Logan and tell him to go and get that asshole - did he know what Bob was doing to Jean? - but Logan was in London, and he wasn't sure he could trust him, what with his connection to Bob. So where did that leave him?

He had to do something. It would drive him crazy not to do something.

Because he had been ill, Xavier was going a bit lighter on him, so when he left for the afternoon he didn't question him about it. Scott couldn't believe where he was going, but it was the only place he knew where he might be able to get some help about the "Bob" problem.

Gaia's Arcane was still where he'd found it last time - he'd been hoping it had moved or blown up or something - and still looked like a New Age shop gone to seed, wind chimes and strands of crystals barely visible behind grimy front windows. It was still ludicrously dark inside the small storefront, and the thick smell of sandalwood and rosemary made him sneeze. "Can I help you?" A woman's high, bright voice inquired.

Behind the counter was a statuesque, well built young woman, with shoulder length black hair and a beautiful face, made eerie only by the fact that the pupils of her eyes were as white as the rest of her eyes, defined only by a thin ring of black on its outer edge. Eyes like Forajo's, and it made him pause for a second. "Are you … are you Forajo's daughter?"

Her painted red lips twisted in a disappointed grimace, and she said, in a startlingly deeper and sexually neutral voice, "God, are all you humans so idiotic? I _am_ Forajo; I got tired of being Gandalf. So what do you want this time? Is Bob looking for something again?"

That threw him for a moment. Last time he'd seen Forajo, he seemed to be an unbelievably old man with wrinkled skin, long white hair, and gnarled fingers (all eight of them), and the contrast was jarring. But he'd already figured out Forajo was a gender neutral demon, neither male or female, so he/she/it could probably decide to appear as whatever gender they saw fit. Still, from Gandalf knock off to Katie Holmes? Little freaky. "Umm, yeah. He needs two things, actually. Can you find a god with a power signature similar to his, even if he was off world?"

Forajo's eyes widened in surprise, and the look he gave him suggested she would need an air sickness bag soon. "Gods no, I don't think so. There's too many dimensions, and too many gods. I don't have that kind of power."

He sighed, wondering if this was all for nothing. "Okay, then maybe you can help me with the second one. I need something that will weaken or depower a god, not even permanently - just for a few minutes would do. We're after an evil one." He added that last bit in hopes that Forajo wouldn't put it together that he was after Bob.

His/her look remained dubious, but at least she didn't look queasy at the thought. "That usually depends on the type of god. Know what kind it is?"

Scott shook his head, deciding the "stupid Human" opinion of Forajo (hadn't he - she - said that before, the first time he was here?) could work for him. "He said I couldn't pronounce the name."

Forajo smirked, a tacit "_I knew it - stupid Humans"_. "Figures. Well … maybe I can help you there. You got cash?"

He nodded. He remembered to bring it this time.

"Okay then, Human - we've got a deal. Let me see what I can pull out of my bag of tricks."

He hoped it was good, and he hoped this was all worth it. Because even if everything did go perfectly, he would be surprised if he lived through it.

* * *

By the time they reached the park, it seemed rather quiet for an early evening, but he knew why when a slight breeze sent the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end. "That ain't good," he commented.

Ruby had changed into jeans and a dark red sweatshirt that looked newer, presumably nicer, but it made the amulet of Mharaka look all that more odd. It was a large ornate disc, slightly larger than a silver dollar, with a pattern like a mandala etched into copper, a series of continuous loops and swirls that would have been meditative to scratch into sand. On the flip side of it was a single gemstone embedded in the metal; it looked like it might have been some kind of opal, or perhaps crystal, but he'd never seen anything quite like it before so he couldn't say. If Ruby knew what it was, she wasn't telling.

She grunted, barely an acknowledgement. "Something doesn't feel right," she agreed, looking around. In the dark, Hyde Park looked far more exotic and interesting - and dangerous - than it did in daylight, which was when it was pretty yet strangely respectable; in other words, quintessentially British. Not that that was bad; after Central Park, it was nice to be in a park that looked as peaceful as it actually was. Central Park was as pretty as the next park, but anybody who wandered in after dark or before dawn - or even in certain sectors in daylight - knew how fucking dangerous it could actually be.

He sniffed the air, and noticed there were several elusive scents, ones that were strange but unidentifiable, and too transient for him to get a bead on. But judging from the general direction of the wind, he made an educated guess. "That way," he said, pointing towards a dark stand of tall trees.

"That looks ominous," she noted, as they started walking towards it. She didn't look around, but after a moment, she whispered, "We have a tail."

"I know. I saw him when we came in. I figure it's one of Hashim's men."

"Hashim?" She looked at him sharply. "You don't mean the vampire mobster, do you?"

"Yeah. He's the vamp that told me about this shit."

She stopped dead, and he had to backtrack a couple steps to meet her eye to eye. "You're working for that bastard?"

"No, I'm not working for him. We kinda worked together on this thing, and we've gotta truce goin' on, but we're hardly friends. He's just scared of this thing, whatever it is, and when vampires get frightened, I worry."

"Worked on this _thing_ together?" She repeated, with obvious disdain.

"Killed an evil god, Kali. Here in fact. Well, in this park, not this exact spot …"

"Kali? You're joking."

"No. It was a huge deal. In fact, I'm kind of surprised you don't know about it."

"How could you …" she was building up to a big snit, but she paused suddenly, her eyes widening in understanding. "Bloody hell, where did you kill Kali?"

"Uh, by the Serpentine Lido-"

"Show me."

She seemed insistent about this, and after taking a moment to orient himself, he led the way there. It took him a moment to find it, but the ground was still kind of scorched in some spots, and he thought he could smell lingering traces of inhuman blood in the dirt. The water was a ribbon of silver in the moonlight, a dark mirror that only showed light in reflection, a ghost road to nowhere. He looked down at the ground, eyes adjusting to the scant illumination, and searched for his own blood. Grass had grown in the spot, so it was gone, but he found some black smears that smelled slightly sour, and he assumed it was Kali's blood. "I think it was about here. Does the exact spot matter?"

She looked down, and from the way she squinted, she didn't see as well in the dark. She then looked at the trees around them, the empty bench near by, the glimmering river. "A god like that could leave a residual energy trace. Know your physics? Energy isn't destroyed -"

"- it's transformed, I know. You're saying it's around here still? It's not coherent."

"No. It's probably dispersed … but Kali was powerful, and powerfully evil. Those things leave stains, psychic scars on the landscape. How the hell did you ever kill her?"

"Well, god intervention, really. And the Vilkacis, and a horde of vampires."

"A murder."

"Huh?"

"It's a murder of vampires, like a murder of crows. It only seemed appropriate."

"Yeah, I guess it does." He scratched his head, and asked, "Is this the reason for this shit? Kali's posthumous revenge?"

She continued to look around, and he joined her, but he had no idea what he was supposed to be looking for. Something strange, he assumed, but he didn't see anything unusual. Finally, she admitted, "No, I don't think it's the reason … precisely. But this energy could have attracted something, or several somethings, that wish to utilize it or exploit it."

"To what end? I was led to believe that if a god was snuffed in a certain way, that was it. No do overs."

From the new evil look he received, she didn't care for the way he put it. "Yes, but the energy remains, and if she was killed on Earth, that energy is here. Or was. I'm not getting that feeling I had when we first entered the park."

"The creepy feeling? No, neither am I."

"So it's mobile." She rubbed the back of her neck, and pursed her lips in thought, her expression sour. Logan could still feel the eyes of Hashim's man on him, and it was starting to drive him crazy. Couldn't he stare at Ruby for a while? But then he heard the muffled snap of twigs in the woods, the crunch of dried leaves under foot, and realized something was coming - something that didn't smell undead, but … demonic. And there were a hell of a lot more than one.

Ruby might have been in her Human form, but her hearing must have been above Human average, because her head snapped around violently towards the towering shadows of the trees. "Are you expecting company?"

"No. You?"

The things must have known they had been sussed, so now they were making themselves known. Eyes glowed in the darkness of the forest, yellow and red like something from a child's nightmare, low enough to suggest it was something on all fours, but a _big_ something on all fours - about grizzly sized was his rough estimate. Shadows clung to them like oil, making them indistinguishable, but he caught their fetid scent, and knew it well. They couldn't be lucky enough to have them be werewolves; he wished they were.

"Can you change at will?" he asked, balling his hands into fists at his sides. Again, he was waiting to pop his claws, but they were itching to get out right now. Impending violence made his skin prickle, sweat bead on his forehead.

"No."

"Then rip off the amulet and hope for the best, 'cause these things are your worst nightmare."

With a bloodthirsty howl of excitement, the demons burst from beneath the trees, barreling towards them like they were the last snacks on earth.


	4. Part 4

The Vilkacis came rampaging towards them, in forms that were already mixed, but continued to transform as they moved. There were four, but more than enough to kill them. He didn't have any Bob energy that he knew how to use defensively against physical beings, and they were of the blood, offspring of the divine. They were dead - the only question would be how long they lasted before they were torn to pieces.

The four had different shapes … at least in theory, but all four had taken what was indeed the basic body of a bear; thick, large, and rippling with muscle, but tentacles sprouted from the bodies at odd angles, muscular snakes flailing out from beneath muscular flesh, and the muzzles were not ursine at all, but reptilian, like crocodiles and raptors. Shape shifters of a higher order still, they could be several different beings at once, and customize their built in weaponry. "I thought we had a deal!" He shouted at them, a last resort. "I helped you kill Kali, remember!" Hadn't the few that survived returned to Kazakhstan?

A bear like being with seven lashing tentacles and a raptor's mouth came lunging at him, toothy jaws open wide, and he sprung his claws and lunged right back, hoping to throw it off its own attack. He saw the tentacles coming for him in mid-air, too fast for him to do much about it, so he felt the things grab him, tendrils as cold and sharp as a shark's scales, but he twisted and slashed out as the thing attempted to swing him back around towards the trees. He sliced through several of the tentacles, making it scream, but sadly, he also went flying through the air, as he was in mid arc of its swing, and he crashed straight into another Vilkacis. But it hadn't seen him and wasn't ready, and they both hit the ground hard, a tangle of limbs and tentacles.

Although his head was ringing, black spots dancing before his eyes like the negatives of moths, he rolled away and back up to his feet, prepared to fight, hoping he could stand up long enough to do it; the impact was about the same as hitting a brick wall while doing at least sixty.

But it was for the Vilkacis he'd hit too, or so it seemed, as only a couple of its tentacles moved listlessly on the ground, drunken snakes, and he realized belatedly that of the two of them, he was made of the much harder substance at the moment. It must have been like being beaned with a Volkswagon. It wouldn't keep it dazed and down for long - they were made of much stronger stuff - but it would keep it down for a bit at least, maybe give them some breathing room.

He heard growling and saw a bear like, reptilian Vilkacis trying to shake a large, hairy animal off its throat. Looking around for Ruby, he saw the amulet of Mharaka gleaming in the pale moonlight, just inches away from the banks of the water, and knew she had taken it off and given it a shot - and her wolfen half responded to the overwhelming sense of evil. Good for her; she might live longer as a wolf, and have more to fight back with. Although she didn't look like a wolf, exactly; she was much bigger than a standard wolf, for example, you could almost get a hint of the Human beneath the thick silver-grey fur and crinkled, leathery muzzle full of jagged teeth.

Tentacles lashed out from the dark and ripped his legs out from under him, sending him crashing to the ground, and before he could slash them away, more tentacles looped around his wrists, avoiding the claws, pulling his arms back. He bucked to try and squirm free, being pulled in two separate directions like it was trying to draw and quarter him, and found the strength of the thing both impressive and overwhelming. Could it tear through adamantium though?

There was an animalistic snarl from the trees, and something came leaping out of it, holding a large branch in front of it like a spear. The Vilkacis hardly had time to shift its focus before the vampire stabbed the thing straight through its heavy body with the tree limb. He then used his gathered momentum and the pained twitch of the Vilkacis to literally pole vault over it, hitting the ground closer to Ruby and her monster. One smart vampire, that one; he was trying to keep clear of the tentacles. Was he one of the group - murder - that helped put down Kali in the first place?

In its throes of pain, and need to remove the coffee table sized splinter in its hide, the tentacles slacked, and he was able to yank himself free and slash out at the vine thin appendages before they could fully retract. He got splattered with blood like oil, hot enough to burn and sour enough to sting his nostrils. An intact tentacle manifested a razor sharp tip and slashed open his face as it whipped by, filling his mouth with blood.

He staggered back, lashing out blindly at a shadow in the corner of his eye and hitting something that tore like steel plating, and another razor sliced open his back. He ran for the still dazed Vilkacis, intending to use its bulk to put some distance between him and the others, and a razor sharp tentacle wrapped around his throat and attempted to rip his head off.

He felt it sink in, slicing open at least one artery, before he managed to cut off its tendril. He dropped to his knees, the sudden gush of warm blood down his chest making him feel paradoxically cold and weak, and he had trouble getting oxygen for a moment, making him wonder if it had nicked his windpipe.

He was healing fast, but the Vilkacis were smart, and had already figured out how to get at him: avoid the bones, cut the body. They would probably try to flay him alive sooner rather than later, and he had no idea when his healing factor would simply give up. At some point, it would.

It was coming for him again, claws like daggers sinking into the soft meat of his gut and digging in, trying to disembowel him, and he pulled out the drug gun Ruby gave him. She didn't trust him to hit her on the first shot, so she loaded it with at least four cartridges. Would ketamine work on a Vilkacis? No time like the present to find out.

He aimed and fired, the dart sinking deep into its now rubbery hide, as the claws continued to rip through his midsection. But they suddenly weakened, went slack, and its tentacles grew flaccid as it keeled over on its side, not quite unconscious, but not alert enough to do much of anything. As long as he didn't miss, he could save a dart for Ruby.

Pulling himself up to his feet, an arm around his gut, he shot the next Vilkacis he saw, and started working his way towards the last one. His stomach burned, but the healing was slow, and to be quite honest, he didn't feel all that well.

With a pained howl, Ruby went flying into the trees, and the vampire was slapped back into the water, giving him a clear shot at the Vilkacis still on its feet/pod/paw/tentacles. He shot it in the eye as one of its tentacles blindsided him, cutting deep into his bicep and trying to rip his arm clean off, but it slackened as the drugs took effect, and slid off his arm, only taking a couple of layers of skin with it.

More blood gushed down his arm, and he was too dizzy to care much about pain. He really needed to sit down for a moment, take a minute to let his fluids build up again, but he heard deep, throaty growling behind him, in stereo.

He looked over his shoulder, and saw the stunned Vilkacis was struggling back up to its appendages, and a bloody Ruby/werewolf had come out of the woods and was now snarling at him like dinner. And he had one dart left.

Oh shit, why did this always happen to him?

He saw lights in the forest, bobbing blobs of flame, and he wondered what fresh hell was coming for him now. He didn't want to die this way, for some stupid reason that was currently beyond his reasoning. (Unless the Vilkacis were somehow killing the children and dismembering the vampires of London - but to what end? They were isolationists who felt they were above the rabble, so why were they in the middle of it? And since when did they suck time away? He could see them doing the dismembering, though - very easily.)

Ruby turned her nose up to the air and sniffed, surely smelling the same thing he did: burning wood, dead bodies. Vampires were coming towards them, ironically armed with torches, and he wondered who they were here to burn. "Shoot the bleedin' Vilkie!" The vampire in the water yelled, climbing back onto shore. He had a thick Cockney burr, and while he totally forgot his name, yeah, he was one of Hashim's men who survived the battle with the Vilkacis. He would recognize that Rags-esque voice anywhere.

"No!" Shouted a female voice from the woods. It sounded like Ghita. "We need one for questioning!"

Ruby turned towards the approaching murder of vampires and snarled, haunches gathering beneath her as she prepared to charge them. This convinced him it couldn't be Ruby who approached Hashim and Ghita the other night, as she was far too forward, even as a werewolf, to have walked away from a fight.

He shot the last dart into her hindquarters, startling a pained yelp from her before she simply collapsed, falling onto her side like a dead dog. The Vilkacis moved then, a tentacle shooting out and slapping him across the face, razor tips slicing open both his eyes. "Fuck!" He lashed out at the tentacles he knew were coming back for him, he could feel it in the shift of the wind, the noise they made as they cut through the air, but as he moved back he hit something - probably the tentacle of one of the drugged Vilkacis - and fell to the ground on his ass. The initial tentacles missed him, slicing the air over his head. "I can't see! It got my eyes!" And he couldn't see, not for the moment; all he could feel was the blood running down his face.

There were solid, dull thuds, something slamming into flesh, and the Vilkacis roared in rage, sounding like it was turning its attention towards the vampires. He heard noise behind him, and a Cockney voice said warily, "No claws, no claws, I'm just gonna pull ya clear."

Should he trust him? Well, didn't matter if he did or didn't; vampires were easy to kill, even blind. Just aim for the head.

He retracted his claws and the Cockney vampire grabbed him under the arms and dragged him back, closer to the water. The guy was dripping all over him, which just added to the general humiliation and unpleasantness. A wet vampire didn't smell any better than a wet dog. "Can ya 'eal from that?" he wondered. "It even cut yer eyelids …"

"I should, yeah." He didn't add 'Given time', as he felt that was implied. There were more thumps, thuds, and angry noises from the Vilkacis, and somebody started shouting strange syllables in a rhythmic form. "What the fuck is goin' on?"

"As soon as I saw the Vilkies were back, I called for 'elp on me cell phone," he said. The twenty first century vampire. "Ghita brought Meldane."

"Meldane?"

"Meldane the Magnifishent," he said. Or at least that's how it sounded. "'e's a stage magician who actually knows real magic, but only uses it in his spare time. 'E took a vow never to use real magic on stage."

"Ah. Umm, why's he with you then?"

"The boss is blackmailin' 'im,"

Well, that was reassuring. He almost asked why, but he decided he really didn't want to know right now. What he wanted was for Michael Caine Junior to stop dripping on him and for his eyes to heal up, but he was so injured his eyes were taking their own sweet time. Damn it!

Meldane stopped his chanting, but the dull thuds kept going on, and the Vilkacis did not sound pleased about it. "Are you the one doin' it then?" Ghita shouted, presumably at the Vilkacis. "Why? Why have you been killin' our people, arseface?" He didn't hear any thuds, but an odd noise - fire flaring? - and the Vilkacis didn't like that judging from the roar. "We'll stop as soon as you start talkin'!"

"She's ours, damn it!" A raspy, inhuman voice said angrily. Must have been the Vilkacis. "You can't have her!"

"Who the hell are you talking about?" Ghita snapped, speaking for them all.

"You won't use what's rightfully ours!" It growled, still not making any sense.

"Are you talking about Kali?" Logan shouted back. It was the only thing that made sense.

"Of course I am, you grave robbers," it snarled, with a voice like steel spikes grating against stone. "Her energy belongs to us. You can't have it!"

"What? What the fuck are you on about?" Ghita replied sharply. "Nobody's stealing her energy. How could they? And why the bloody fuck would they _want_ to?"

His eyes were burning, and he thought he was starting to see things, slight gradations in the darkness, almost resolving into lumpy shadows. He still felt weak and cold, though, and he desperately wanted to take a nap, but now was not the time. "Somebody might be stealing her energy, but it ain't us," Logan snapped. "There's a lot of weird shit goin' on, and we're tryin' to figure out who's responsible. If we had her energy, couldn't we have fought you off better? Shit, man - woman, whatever the fuck you are - think!"

There was a long, thick pause of silence, during which the only sound was the rumbling of a garbage disposal … or, was that the Vilkacis still growling? Probably.

"You're all liars," the Vilkacis finally grumbled. "Meat bags and dead things, full of lies."

He was so tired of being referred to as a "meat bag".

"Hardly," Ghita replied, her tone caustic. "We're not the fuckwit dismemberin' vampires 'cause you think they're sippin' your dead mam's juices."

"What? What are you talking about?" The Vilkacis replied, its rage tempered with confusion.

"Somebody's been tearing our people apart limb from limb. It's you, isn't it? You motherfucking bastard."

But Logan knew, just from the Vilkacis' obvious befuddlement, that it hadn't been tearing anyone up - or at least not vampires. "No. Why would I waste my time on dead things? You stink of rot."

"Great. So this has been one of those misunderstanding fights?" Logan complained. "What the fuck? Would it have killed you to ask what the fuck we were _doing_ here?"

"You were desecrating her site," the Vilkacis snarled back.

"The fuck we were! We were just standin' here, and you attacked us like a pack o' wild dogs!"

"Tha's true," the Cockney vampire agreed. "I saw the 'ole thing."

"Why don't you help us as opposed to fight us?" Logan demanded. "Shit. How could anyone steal her energy anyways? How do you know someone's doin' it? I thought it dispersed."

The Vilkacis growled again, but its voice was starting to sound slightly more humanoid, and he heard the truly strange noise of broken bones knitting themselves back together again, sinews and skin shrinking and tightening, as the Vilkacis took on another - presumably less threatening - form. To hear it without seeing it seemed worse somehow, made his imagine go wild with what could have been happening, even though he knew from past experience it was bad, but not as bad as his mind wanted to make it. "We saw it was happening, and we responded. The energy is ours; she is ours by blood. No one else can have it."

"You haven't answered a single fecking one of his questions," Ghita helpfully pointed out.

The Vilkacis sighed, sounding almost Human; the gender was still indeterminate. "The energy was dispersed when she died. But our oracles said it was being gathered again - gathered and siphoned off to some place or person we have yet to locate. The energy is ours by right and no one else can have it."

"What the fuck would we do with Kali energy?" Logan snapped. "Bake muffins?"

They ignored him. "Who could gather the energy together? And who could keep it secret from you?" Ghita wondered.

There was enough of a pause before the Vilkacis answered that he assumed it shook its head, or whatever was currently approximating a head. "There is much black magic being used, and you have a mage with you."

"I am not a mage!" A man with a hint of a French accent exclaimed. Meldane? "I'm just a magician. Er, uh, not a black magician either. Mostly white, y'know, stuff that won't bite me on the ass so hard. And I'm not with them! I just came tonight 'cause … er …"

"You can shut up now," Ghita suggested.

"Yeah, fine." He sounded relieved.

"There is a lot of weird shit goin' on," Logan interjected. "And right now we'd prob'ly be better off working together than ripping each other to shreds, don't you think?" He wished Ruby was conscious - and Human - because she might have some theories on who could be draining god energy and using black magic to block demi-gods, but right now it probably didn't matter, because he was on the verge of passing out. "Maybe, if we put our heads together, we can find the real punk ass bitch doing this, and make them wish they had never even considered the possibility of fucking with us. We got an agreement?"

There were wet slithering noises, sounds of movement in muck, and he understood that the other Vilkacis were starting to regain consciousness. Ruby was still out, and probably would be until next year, but she was just a werewolf, and not a demi-god.

There was some general snarling, and Ghita warned, "Make them stand down."

The humanoid Vilkacis sighed, and said something in a clipped, harsh language that sounded like an amalgam of Urdu and Russian; he thought he could make out the word "assholes". But the growling subsided, and the humanoid Vilkacis said, "We must consult our Queen."

He knew Soriya was dead. They must have coronated someone else. Was there a Vilkacis princess?

"Fine. But none of this attacking bullshit, or I'll sic a real sorcerer on you," Ghita warned.

"Hey," Meldane protested weakly.

"I'll let the Powers know what happened here," Logan said, keeping his voice low. A threat like this was better delivered quietly. "I'll let them know you almost killed one of their avatars. Think how they'll feel about that."

Stone silence; not even the noise of slithering filled the gap. They might have been demi-gods, and more powerful than all of them, but against full gods they were outmatched and they knew it, especially with so few of their numbers left. "You wanna buy my silence, you knock this shit off now," he concluded, spitting out the final words like bullets.

Things remained quiet for a full minute, before the Vilkacis finally broke the silence by repeating, "We will consult our Queen."

"You do that," Ghita said impatiently. "You wanna get going now?"

Logan could smell the resentment, taste it like a heavy acridness in the air, but he also knew they would play ball at least for now, mainly because there was nothing else they could do. Maybe after they consulted their Queen, they'd have more tricks up their sleeves. If they had sleeves … man, he didn't want to think about it right now. Staying conscious was hard enough.

The darkness hadn't let up much, even though his eyes continued to burn. But his throat was still burning a little, as was his arm, back, and abdomen. He had some serious healing left to do, and he needed some down time. And maybe a keg of beer.

He heard the Vilkacis pull themselves together, into something more inconspicuous, and walk - well, stagger (the drugs weren't totally gone from their systems yet) - off, and he attempted to shift position in preparation for getting to his feet as well, but every sudden movement felt like it was shifting the blood around in his head, an unsteady sea that was threatening to pull him down.

"Wanna get up?" The Cockney vampire asked.

"No, I like sitting in mud. Yes, I wanna get up."

"Geeze, geezer, I was only bein' polite," the vampire replied, grabbing him under the arms and helping him up to his feet. He tried not to take geezer personally, it was just British slang, but he did want to point out he wasn't old. Except he didn't know how old he was, so he didn't say anything, just scowled.

His head swam at the shift in altitude, and he staggered slightly, the vampire having to steady him before he crashed into him. "Y'know, yer still bleedin' a lot," the vamp pointed out helpfully.

"No shit." He hated to have to depend on this guy, he had no idea who the fuck he was, but he ended up leaning on him heavily as they stumbled forward, and by smell alone he knew he was getting close to Ruby. "We need to bring her with us."

Ghita was close; he could smell her too. "We could just kill her."

"No. She's a friend … well, okay, no she's not. But she's a former Watcher, and unlike Camilla, she can venture out in daylight. We need her, so she isn't hurt, got it? Oh, and she lost her necklace by the shore; I need it."

"You need a necklace?" Ghita asked in disbelief.

"It's hers, she needs it. I'd get it, but my eyes haven't exactly healed up yet."

"Yeah, I can see that." She sighed, and said, "Craig, go get it. And Alex, grab the wolf."

"Aww fuck, why do I always get the shit jobs?" Alex complained, picking up Ruby.

If he wasn't holding Ruby, Logan would have kicked the asshole for that.

They got out of the park, and then some negotiations went on. Logan wasn't ready to reveal Ruby's address to them, and in the end it wouldn't have mattered, because Ruby wasn't conscious enough to invite a vampire into her home. (No one was sure if that rule applied to werewolves or not, as not a single vamp present ever tried it at a werewolves' home.) So he ended up with Ruby Meldane's Jaguar, although Ruby ended up in the trunk as he didn't really have a back seat to speak of, and he was nervous about riding with a werewolf up front, even though Logan assured him she'd probably be out 'til the turn of the century. Well, Ruby was out cold, and still a wolf, so she wasn't going to care either way.

Meldane got them to her house in one piece, which seemed like a minor miracle considering how he drove, and because Logan's eyesight still hadn't come back to him, Meldane had to help him get in the house. (And he had to carry Ruby, as he remained afraid to touch her.)

But he was useful for some things. Once he put Ruby in the back bedroom, Meldane cast a spell over the room, effectively "locking" it until she was Human again (only a human could walk through the spell - how that worked Logan had no idea), so everyone would be safe from a werewolf attack, even if she woke up early and he fell asleep.

Once that was done, Meldane couldn't leave fast enough, and Logan was glad, as that allowed him to feel his way to the couch and collapse, finally letting himself slip into an almost blissful unconsciousness. He just hoped he'd be able to see when he finally woke up.

* * *

There was blood smeared all over the halls.

Logan had just walked through the double doors of Xavier's, wondering why it was so quiet, and the reek of blood was an answer he really hadn't wanted. He strained to hear anything in the school, anything that might travel down these long and empty corridors, but the silence was absolute. It was like being in a tomb.

"Professor," he shouted, hoping trouble would come rushing towards the noise. He itched to spring his claws, but didn't dare, as he didn't want to give his opponent any advance warning.

Finally he caught sound, so sudden it was like plugs had been ripped out of his ears. Up ahead, around the turn of the corridor, was the unmistakable sound of flesh upon flesh, someone getting beaten. He gave up silence for speed, racing around the corner, nearly skidding in the blood, and found himself suddenly in a large, open room he'd never been in before.

Scott was on the floor, laying in an ever widening pool of blood, while a figure completely shrouded in darkness sat on his chest and pounded on his face, which was already partially unidentifiable and as bloody as a pound of ground chuck. His visor was long since broken, but since his eyes were swollen shut, it didn't matter. "Hey!" Logan shouted, tackling his assailant.

It wasn't a person in black clothing; it was a void shaped like a person, something that felt physical but couldn't be seen. Logan rammed his claws straight through it, only to feel something like claws stab him right through the gut, but they burned like they'd been heated over flames.

He growled in pain - he didn't have the breath to scream - and said under his breath, "Fuck this shit." He guessed what was the head and ripped through it, severing the head from the neck, with enough force that the head rolled across the floor, even though the body simply dissolved, disappearing as if it had never even been here.

He hit the floor on his knees, splashing in Scott's blood, and wrapped his arms around his gut, which was still burning like it was on fire. Damn, it hurt. It felt like things were eating him, little bugs feeding on his flesh and burrowing in deep. "Can't die on me, Boy Scout," he said, although he had the feeling he probably was dead, he just didn't smell like it yet. "I need to know what the fuck happened here."

"You made a choice," a voice said, and while it didn't sound familiar at first, it seemed to morph with each syllable, becoming clearer and more familiar.

He looked towards the fallen head, and as he watched, the shadows melted away, falling off like a poorly made shroud, and he found himself looking at Jean's head, still alive even though she no longer had a body.

Alive and grinning, a leering smile of pure malevolence that made him want to run from the room screaming, flames dancing in her eyes as if barely contained by the sockets. "I just can't believe you chose him over me."

Okay, now he knew this was a nightmare. His mouth was dry, tasting of stale bile, and he didn't know what to say. But Jean wasn't finished. "You can only save one," she said, almost laughing. "Make your choice."

When he jolted awake on Ruby's couch, it was with the sick feeling that he had just been given a warning.


	5. Part 5

Logan sat up, peeling himself off the settee, aware that Ruby would gut him as soon as she saw how much he'd bled on her furniture, and was so unsettled by his dream that it took him a moment to realize he could see again. His vision was a little cloudy at the edges, but it was a huge improvement over not being able to see anything at all.

It was just a nightmare, right? Sure it was. That's why he had a deeply uneasy feeling in his stomach, a pervasive sense of doom like a bad taste in his mouth. Shit.

How much did a long distance call to the States cost? He had no idea, so he just pulled out what cash he had and left it on a side table as he found Ruby's phone and punched in Xavier's number. Even while waiting for someone to pick up, he felt like a complete asshole.

Outside the sky was just starting to lighten, the sun not quite up yet but certainly on its way, and he wondered if Ruby was still in wolf form. Not that it mattered, he was just curious how that whole werewolf thing was supposed to work. And, frankly, he would probably rather deal with a pissed off wolf than Ruby in her Human form.

Finally the phone was answered, and Xavier said, "Xavier's Instit -" Just by his sudden, thick pause, he knew he'd been made. "Logan," he said, his voice instantly and amazingly frosty.

"Yeah, yeah, I know. Can you save being pissed off at me for a minute? This is kinda important."

"Oh? Do you need more children to help you attack the Organization?"

Ouch. Sure, he might come off like a mutant version of Gandhi, but Xavier could be as mean anyone when he put his mind to it. "Look, it wasn't - oh, fuck it. I think you're in danger over there. Or maybe Scott is. I couldn't tell."

"What do you mean?" His voice had thawed a little, but not by much.

"Well, I think somebody sent me a warning, but I'm not sure who. Still, it feels pretty real."

He seemed to mull that over, and unlike Scott, he didn't immediately dismiss him. "What kind of danger?"

"That's just it. I'm not sure. Or …" he trailed off, having a problem just considering the possibility. Voicing it seemed too difficult. He had to have the wrong end of the stick there, didn't he? It must have been metaphorical, a symbolic representation of something beyond him. It couldn't have been literal. (Could it?)

Xavier must have picked up on his trepidation over the phone, as he asked, with a hushed sort of urgency, "Or what, Logan?"

He couldn't say it. How could he say this? It felt like a betrayal, or perhaps slander, but there was no way around it. As much as he wanted to deny it, his instinct for self-preservation wouldn't let him. "Jean."

"Jean?" Xavier repeated, as shocked as he felt. After a moment, he asked, "When did you talk to her last?"

"Uh, god, I don't remember. It must've been … wait, it was last time I was here. When she helped us kill Kali." When he figured out that Jean had betrayed them - no, him - and never said a word about it. Was that why he hadn't heard from her since?

"What aren't you telling me?"

That was the drawback of talking to a telepath - they always knew when you were hiding something. Oh hell; he'd already slurred Jeannie by suggesting she was a threat. He could hardly make this worse. "She … I think she helped release Kali in the first place."

"The god who almost killed Bob?"

"Yeah. I mean, she must have changed her mind about it, 'cause she helped me kill her, but they seemed to know each other. She never mentioned that to me."

Xavier was quiet for several seconds, and he could feel the tension bleeding over the open line. "She must have changed her mind about killing you."

"What?"

"If Bob died before you, you'd inherit his powers, yes? To get rid of Bob, they'd have to get rid of you as well, correct?"

Holy shit - that hadn't occurred to him before. But Jean wouldn't hurt him … but she wasn't just Jean anymore, was she? "Maybe I'm not her favorite person in the world, but how could she -"

"We're acting on the assumption it's Jean we're dealing with. Are we sure about that? Jean wasn't the type to hurt anyone, and certainly not unleash a psychopathic god on the world. You've talked to her more than any of us. Are you certain it's her?"

The million dollar question, and one he wasn't totally comfortable thinking about. He twisted the phone cord around his forearm, until it was tight enough to leave a mark against his skin. Like most things, it faded quickly. "I … she's in there somewhere. Something of her is there, it must be, otherwise she would have gone through with it."

"I agree. But just the fact that she considered it, that she helped instigate it in the first place, indicates there can't be much of the old Jean left."

"So what are you saying? She's fading all the time? She's going nuts? Why would she kill Scott when she couldn't kill me?"

Judging from the new, dramatic pause, he had stunned him. "Kill Scott? What are you talking about? Is that what you saw?"

Oh, right, he hadn't mentioned that little factoid yet. "Yeah, but she killed most of the school, I think. If it was her. It was kinda abstract, so I don't know if it was really her. Kinda hope not."

Xavier sighed impatiently. "This isn't helping."

"Look, I know! It was just … it was weird, okay? More feeling than coherence. I don't know, maybe this was a mistake."

"If you think it was a message, I'm inclined to believe you," he sighed, surprising Logan with that level of trust. But then again, he had ties of some kind to this weird otherworld, the one that took place in plain sight and was almost never noticed by anyone. Magic was a nicer explanation than deliberate ignorance, but the facts seemed to support the latter. Xavier just had to trust that with these ties Logan could tell a genuine alarm from a simple nightmare - and since most of his nightmares involved mutilation or a dead wife, it was a good bet this was something else. "Was this a message from Jean?"

A simple, basic question, but Logan found it mildly shocking, mainly because he hadn't considered it. And now that he was thinking about it, the shock seemed to get worse. "No, I don't think it was. I mean, I don't know who it was from, but it wasn't from her. I know her by now, I would have known it was her the moment I came in. Damn, I'm not sure who it was. I'd know Bob too, and when he crashes my dreams, he makes a big entrance. Maybe it's related to what I'm doing here."

"What are you doing there?"

"Some demon shit." He suddenly wondered if the comment "You can only save one of them" didn't people, but locations. Here and there, London and Xavier's. Was there a connection? "Just .. You might wanna warn Scott, but don't tell him about the Jean thing. I don't know how he'd handle that."

"If Jean is a threat to him or the school, he has to be told."

"I know, but how do you think that will go down?"

"It's not going down well with me at the moment," Xavier countered, but with a sense of weariness. He must have already figured out that the "old" Jean, the purely Human one, was gone. This was a new Jean, one they didn't quite know, and perhaps simply couldn't know. He recalled her "happy place", a garden reduced to an overgrown, threatening alien jungle, the most visible sign of her mental deterioration. Did he actually think that she could handle that much power and not be driven mad by it? He remembered - vaguely - the time he clued in to Bob's power, and was rendered comatose by it. How could you know all those things, feel and hear so much, have so much power in the palm of your hand, and not be driven instantly bugfuck nuts? Did he think because it was Jean, because she seemed to be the most genuinely un-fucked up person he'd ever met, she could handle it better?

(It begged the question why Bob wasn't insane, but it was quite possible he was - it's just that he was Bob, and insanity probably looked good on him, like most things did. Always looking good was probably a god thing, but, again, it depended on your definition of good.)

Xavier sighed again, and he thought he could hear him drumming his fingers on his desk. "When he gets back, I'll find a way to break it to him."

"Gets back? Where is he?"

"Honestly? I'm not sure. He's been restless since returning from Mirror Lake."

"Restless? Like what, like me?"

"I wasn't going to say that … but yes, actually, now that you mention it. He seems to be full of rage, but I'm not sure at what."

"The Organization? Me?"

"Yes, both. And himself, perhaps others."

"Any reason why? 'Cause the Sisters took some people out? Because they and Helga had to rescue us?"

"I have no idea. He won't talk much about it, and currently he seems angry at me."

"Why?"

"Because I'm here and you're not." There was a bit of an ironic edge in his voice when he said it, but Logan wondered how honest Xavier was actually being with him. Scott may have been a Boy Scout, and he may have been insanely devoted to Xavier, but he was still Human, as was Xavier - shit came up between people, they didn't always see eye to eye. Or visor to eye, as the case may be. "We're not finished with the Mirror Lake situation, you know."

"I know. But both Saddiq and Rogue are old enough to make their own decisions, and they've already been through dangerous shit."

"So that's a reason to put them back in it?"

"No, but they're not naïve. They can make their own decisions, and they can take care of themselves. Hell, I trust Saddiq to protect the whole fucking school. He's good, you know?"

"I know, but -"

"Chuck, I mean _good_, " he interrupted impatiently. "He was born and bred to fight, and he's better than most of what the Organization has at their command. Since he almost killed their guy, they have to know that. He had to personally pay them a visit and draw a line, or they would have come back for him. Do you understand?"

"Do you understand that you and Scott could have gotten them killed? Honestly Logan, could you have lived with yourself if that happened?"

"That's why I brought the Sisters and Helga. With them there, it wasn't -"

"And after what happened to -" Xavier stopped short, but it wasn't in time. Logan knew what he was about to say: _Leonie_. It was like a punch in the gut, and he felt suddenly very sick, and very angry. If this hadn't been Ruby's phone, he would have snapped it in half.

"Don't you dare," he snarled, gritting his teeth to keep from saying something even worse.

"I'm sorry," he began hastily. "I didn't mean -"

"I can't talk about this," he said, and slammed down the receiver, restraining himself from throwing the entire phone across the fucking room. Logically, he knew Xavier wasn't a vindictive man (why was Magneto still alive if he was?) or a hurtful one (again, Magneto), that this was just something that slipped out in the heat of the moment. Those things happened; he could deal with that. But it was way too fucking soon, and him bringing her up - or at least attempting to - was like a handful of salt being rubbed into a sucking chest wound.

Now he was fully awake, and fully pissed off, the pervasive sense of doom gone like a cheap beer, and he knew he had to get out of here. His skin itched with dried blood, both his and the Vilkacis, but he knew Ruby would quite possibly disembowel him with a fork if he used her shower. And, on top of that, his clothes were a bloodied, tattered mess; somehow, he bet Ruby had nothing in his size. Then there was Srina, who hadn't heard from him since he'd gone out last night. Damn. He had to go home and take his ass kicking like a man. And then, hopefully, get that shower.

He decided to leave Ruby a note, as that was the polite thing to do. So he wrote something short and to the point on the back of a piece of junk mail, leaving it on the table with the "protective circle" on it, so she couldn't miss it. _'Ruby - I know about the fucking couch, all right? I'll buy you a new one as long as the world doesn't end or get sucked into another dimension, or whatever the hell. Amulet is on the kitchen table. - Logan P.S.: You're welcome.'_

He knew very well she could decide to kill him, but hell, she'd probably decide that on the basis of the couch alone. He didn't have much to lose being a dick.

By the time he left her cottage, the sky was a pale blue, and while the sun was quite up yet, all the lingering traces of night had fled, leaving nothing but a chill behind. He then realized he should have called a cab, as he had a bloody long walk ahead of him, but then he realized that this was better. He needed to get out some energy, and walking a couple of miles would burn it off nicely. Wait, walk? Fuck that. He broke into a run - not a jog, not like those Yuppies who clogged the bike paths in their fifty dollar running gear. Oh no, a full on "Jason's after me with a chainsaw" run. He was angry, he could feel it like shrapnel lodged in his chest, and if he didn't get some of it out somehow, he didn't know what was going to happen, but it wouldn't be good. So he decided to see how fast he could run, how long he could tear through the London countryside before he absolutely had to stop and let his healing factor have a longer go at him.

It felt good for the first mile or so; it felt like he could outrun all this shit, everything he didn't want to think about. He didn't think at all, just tried to go Zen, concentrate on his breathing, the beating of his heart and the sound of his feet hitting the ground. Hardly being aware of it, he changed his gait so his footfalls were instantly quieter, and once again he wondered how he knew to do that, where he learned that. His lungs began to burn from lack of adequate oxygen and the back of his legs began to burn from the strain, but he could take it; the burn was almost the same as the healing factor that kicked in to fix the problem. He was good, he was fine.

No, no he wasn't.

He reached a small town, or what passed for one in this pathetic little burgh where Ruby lived, and paused against a street light to catch his breath, to let the flush of his healing abilities wash over him, and he felt a sudden clot in his throat that was hard to swallow down. He closed his eyes against sudden tears, wishing he had something to punch. He hated this. He didn't want this responsibility; any of them. He couldn't even take care of himself, or at least not well. He didn't want to be responsible for anyone else's well being, be it kids or the entire fucking world. He wanted to get swallowed up by a huge black hole, where he could live in complete peace, where no one could ever find him.

He was a complete fucking coward. Did anyone know that? Had they figured it out yet? Hell, how many times had he lost his mind? How many times could it break and be fully reconstructed? Could it ever, even once? He didn't know, and he didn't want to know anymore. It would probably be better for everyone if he completely dropped out; it would certainly be safer. Who did he think he was kidding, pretending he could have a "normal" life? He was an unstable "weapon", one that could go off at any time, and if Xavier didn't feel so fucking sorry for him - or so in need of a "weapon" of his own - he would have taken Scott's advice and never allowed him within three hundred feet of the school again.

That was a good thing about a hard run that he realized only in retrospect.: hard gasps sounded like sobs.

He was pulling himself together, tamping down his self-loathing so Srina wouldn't pick up on it, when he heard the thrum of a familiar motor coming up the street. He wiped the sweat from his face with his forearm as a candy apple red Jaguar pulled up to the curb, and the passenger door popped open. "There you are," Meldane's voice drifted out. "Get in. We're on."

Logan glanced in, wondering if the guy knew how much he was pushing his luck right now. He was actually younger than he expected, maybe early thirties, with shoulder length brown hair and a square jaw, his Roman nose and sunken brown eyes not making him classically handsome, but there was little disputing there was something visually striking about him. He kind of looked like that guy from La Femme Nikita. "We, kemosabe? On what, exactly?"

"There's trouble, it's a little too sunny for the others, and I need some muscle." Meldane squinted at him, and noted, "Your eyes look good. How'd you do that?"

"I was born this way." He hated the presumption that he'd just jump in the passenger seat because he said so, but then again, the idea of going to work as "muscle" was tempting. The run wasn't quite enough. He needed action and exertion; he needed not to have to think. Thinking, for him, never ended well. "What's the problem?"

"I'll fill you in on the way. We really need to get going."

Logan made a show of thinking about it, then sighed and rolled his eyes, getting into his car. He almost felt like a male prostitute, and the idea of demanding cash up front came and went quickly, as he was pretty sure Meldane wouldn't get the joke.

As soon as he slammed the door shut, Meldane did an illegal U-turn and headed back down the way he had come. "So how bad is this?" He wondered, actually afraid of the answer.

Meldane shrugged a single shoulder, eyes focused tightly on the road ahead. "On a scale of one to four? Defcon three."

"So, could be worse?"

"Oh sure. Everything can be worse."

Great. He just got in a car with a French pessimist.

Come to think of it, this was probably the most normal thing he'd done in a long time.

5

Since he couldn't ignore the incoming comm signal forever, Scott simply disconnected a circuit, killing the entire thing. If the Professor really wanted to get in touch with him, he could use his telepathy, but he knew the distance would make it increasingly less worthwhile. He was pretty sure he'd just entered California airspace.

Sneaking out a jet was near impossible, although not totally without precedent. He just needed to make sure Xavier wasn't around when he did it, and since he had things to attend to in town, he just waited until he and Piotr left before returning to get it. He didn't care if the kids reported it, as Xavier would just be able to look at the hangar and see that a plane was missing; it didn't matter once he was away.

Of course, taking the jet was the easy part. The hard part was going to be finding a place to land it in Los Angeles, although there was probably an angle there he could work, considering how well he could lie. He could just say it was an experimental aircraft for a film, and bluff his way into getting a small, private airport to let him use a hangar. How long he could keep that bluff going he had no idea, but he was hoping he wouldn't have to do it for long. Maybe he couldn't find it in a phone book, but he could find the Way Station in person, and then see if the thing Forajo had pawned off on him really worked as advertised. For the money he paid, it damn well better.

He started shedding speed and dropping altitude , and as he broke through what could only be a very high layer of smog, he could see Los Angeles just below him on the horizon. It was night, and so the city wasn't so much lit up as burning with lights, a truly gaudy sight that must have been visible from space. Arteries of lights led to and trained off from a central nexus of illumination, a tentacled mass of light that threatened to hurt his eyes through his visor.

Maybe it was the fact that he was at a slower speed, or lower altitude, but he could hear his cell phone in his coat pocket start to ring. Luckily, he had shed his coat and tossed it in the back cabin, so he felt no compelling need to answer it, and the incessant ringing didn't bother him. He figured it was Xavier, still trying to talk to him, or the telemarketers were just a more adaptable and vicious breed in this part of California.

He put the jet on auto-pilot for now, as he wouldn't be on an approach vector until he settled on which small airstrip would be most convenient and best suit his purposes, and called up the nearby airports on the computer screen off to his left. There were more than he expected, but it was L.A., and it seemed to have a little too much of everything. Including gods and demons.

For a moment, he wondered if he really knew what he was doing. Could he trust dreams? Did he dare? If someone with the power to project thoughts into his head knew about his relationship with Jean, and the horribly complex mess with Bob and Camaxtli, they could be constructing all those dreams. But there were a lot of 'if"s in that scenario, the least of which was a psychic projector who managed to work around Xavier without him noticing, which was so unlikely it was virtually impossible. Besides, if Jean really was in danger and he did nothing to help her, he couldn't live with himself.

A confrontation between him and Bob had been a long time coming. At least now maybe he could meet him on an even footing, or die trying.

* * *

Noticing that Meldane was giving him a funny look out of the corner of his eye, Logan asked, "What?"

"You didn't clean up from last night, did you? You still smell like Vilkacis."

"I haven't had a chance, have I?" He really didn't like the accusing tone in his voice, which always sounded a bit worse with a French accent. "What the hell kind of name is Meldane?"

From the way he shifted in the driver's seat, he hadn't liked his tone any better. "A stage name, short and catchy."

"Ain't that catchy, is it?"

He scowled, but Logan wasn't sure if it was for the traffic or him. Probably fifty-fifty. "It's better than Mordred."

He scoffed. "Mordred? What, is that your real name?" Meldane's scowl deepened, and he didn't dare look at him, which was pretty much an affirmative. "Holy shit. How much did your mother hate you?"

"Look, I don't make fun of your name, do I? Just drop it."

Logan smirked, aware that even "Wolverine" was better than Mordred. That sounded like the name of a villain from a bad Disney film, even though he knew the truth was even worse: the incestuous, evil bastard child of King Arthur, right? No wonder he took up with magic; it was probably the only way to keep from getting the shit beaten out of him every day in school. "Your mother wasn't named Morgan le Fay, was she?"

Meldane's eyes narrowed, and he cast a quick glance in his director before taking a corner way too hard and staring resolutely at the road, jaw clenching firmly. "Just drop it, okay? I can always cast a spell to make you forget."

"Hell man, you don't need to do that. Forgetting's what I do best."

As they cut down a side road, Meldane had to slow the car to a crawl to avoid hitting people who ran towards and past them, with only the newly frightened bothering to scream. "I thought you said this was a Defcon three," Logan snapped, opening his car door as soon as the crush of people would allow. Meldane had no choice but to park anyways, as there was no way they were going to get any further without plowing people down like tenpins.

"On my scale, Defcon four is the actual end of the world."

"Oh, great." As soon as he was out of the car, he grabbed a random person, and asked, "What's going on?"

The person - a young woman who was either trying to look like a pop star or a hooker - looked at him with wide, pale eyes, and said, "There's a monster tearin' up the street! I think it's eatin' people!" She pulled out of his grasp and ran for it, and he turned to stare at Meldane over the hood of the car.

"You couldn't mention people eating monster?"

But Meldane just turned away nonchalantly and waved his hand, making the people mysteriously part and make a path for him. Logan had to struggle against the crowd, but luckily he was pretty good at that.

As soon as he joined Meldane just outside the mouth of the side street, away from the rest of the fleeing crowd, the magician asked, "Ever heard of a Golgoth demon?"

"No. Why?"

"Now you have."

He gestured down the street, towards what sounded like the rending of metal and shattering of glass, and Logan looked to see the biggest demon he had seen, outside of that big ass snake thing that tried to eat him near Angel's old hotel.

It was maybe twelve feet tall and ten feet from tusk to tail, looking for all the world like an unfortunate mating between a warthog and Godzilla. It seemed to walk on all fours, but only the back legs had hooves; the from legs ended in scaled, thick hands, that he watch tear the roof off a building like it was made of Popsicle sticks. It shoved a handful of roofing material in its wide, tusked mouth, and chewed it like cud. Its hide was black, and shimmered slightly in the rising dawn, made of scales so fine it could have been chainmail. Behind it, Logan could see holes in the street that its hooves had made, making him wonder how fucking heavy it actually was.

"Uh, what's the game here?" He asked, as it snuffled parked cars, looking for all the world as if it was grazing. "How do you kill these things?"

"I don't want you to kill it," Meldane informed him quietly. "I need a chunk of its flesh and blood."

He glared at him anew. "Say that again?"

"Golgoths are helpers; familiars to very powerful spell casters. If I can bind it to me, I can make it tell me who brought it forth - the person who must be behind all of this mess - and then we can make it lead us to him. The solution to our problems are right here, but only if I can get its blood. Nothing less than blood magic will work here."

"And you couldn't get a sword and hack some off yourself?"

Meldane gave him a smug smirk, like he was a complete idiot who just asked how people didn't float off the face of the Earth. "Their skin is made of an iron composite; it's almost impossible to cut. But Hashim said something about you have a special metal in your body?"

Oh god damn it. Even from beyond the grave, Stryker was still making his life a very special living hell. He shook his head and looked at the Golgoth, who peacefully bit the roof off an SUV, its drool so hot it actually fell to the asphalt steaming. "I'm never forgiving any of you for this," he snarled, stalking towards the beast and popping his claws.

This was the most perfect example of "beware what you wish for" he had ever encountered. He should have known not to push his shitty luck.


	6. Part 6

The thing didn't look up as he approached, just kept sniffing around the undamaged park cars on the side of the street, and he wondered if the woman had been exaggerating when she called it a "people eater". Oh, it was ugly all right - it had a long, tapered muzzle, with two tusks as long as surface to air missiles, but thicker, and two yellow eyes that were so small they looked like they were receding into what passed for its face - but so far it seemed more interested in eating metal than eating people. (Unless, of course, it was eating the cars in hopes of finding a chewy, meaty center.)

Still, he kept on a parallel course to it, taking a brief visual survey of its thick, stocky body, which continued to have an odd, almost opalescent sheen to it. The scales overlapped, almost like fish scales as opposed to reptile ones, and he found himself wondering if the key to taking a chunk out of its hide with a normal implement was sliding something between and beneath the scales. Not that that would be easy, not with the sheer amount of them, or their unique layering pattern.

It had some wide flanks, from which a thin and utterly useless tail dangled and sometimes twitched, as if swatting away flies, but even the flies seemed too scared to get near it. It smelled a bit like a tire fire in a lavender field, which should have been a fly heyday, but on the other hand, even he wanted to get a gas mask and put some distance between them. Say a mile, upwind.

He decided he could just carve a chunk out of its rear leg, and it would never miss it. Hell, it had iron skin, right? It might not even feel it. Still, he felt weird going up and doing it, especially since what Meldane told him seemed to indicate that - no matter how much it looked like a warthog - it could talk. "Umm, hey," Logan said, now feeling even more like a jackass. "Can we talk for a minute?"

It continued to ignore him, sniffing among the cars, its big, moist black pad of a nose quivering.

"C'mon, I know you can. Just 'cause I ain't a wizard or your boss or whatever is no need to be rude."

"Would you just get on with it?" Meldane interjected from his safe vantage point down the street.

Logan made a rude hand gesture at him, retracting the middle claw briefly for the full effect. "Look, Golgoth, you talk to me or Frenchie down there wants me to carve a chunk out of your ass."

The demon pig continued to forage among the cars, finally biting the fender off a Peugeot and munching nosily, sounding for all the world like a car crusher.

Logan sighed. "Fine. Shit, I hate hurting animals." He backed up several steps, braced himself, and then ran at the Golgoth, bringing back his right claw for a surgical swipe at its rear right leg.

He made contact, the flesh so thick and hard it was putting up some good resistance to his claws - although it wasn't preventing him from cutting into him - and there was a noise like a cougar in a blender being put out at stadium amplifier volume. It seems he'd finally gotten the Golgoth's attention.

And it kicked out sideways, a move it didn't know it could make, and the iron hard hoof hit him square in the chest, with enough force that it would have easily caved in his sternum had it not been made of metal as well. Logan went flying, straight across the street and right through an antique shop's plate glass front window.

He heard the glass not so much break as shatter - this part of town wasn't bad enough to warrant the use of bulletproof glass - and he came down hard near the front counter, shattering several lamps, a roll top desk, and what looked like a Victorian era chamber pot chair in the course of his very bumpy landing.

His head bounced off the floor, and to say he felt dazed and cut up was a slight understatement. A bruise the size of a shield was forming on his chest, even as his healing factor worked hard to negate it. He watched his vision swim, black dots jumping in and out of reality, and blood seemed to well up in his throat before mysteriously disappearing again. He had cuts on his body stinging like tiny bees, but that was almost pleasant compared to the rest of his pain. He was laying on something hard and lumpy, and he seriously hoped it wasn't his own leg, bent up beneath him at some mysterious and unbelievably painful angle.

There was noise, some debris shifting and cursing, boots crunching on broken glass, and a dark shape appeared over him, eventually becoming Meldane. "Will you quit goofing off and get me my sample?"

Logan stared up at him, wondering if he should just kill him now. One swipe and it was all over; he could be out of here and on his way to Srina's, and the demon pig could eat all of Mayfair as far as he was concerned. Why did he always get these shitty demon pig jobs?

He held up his right claw, and said, "Here's your fucking sample, yer highness. Now leave me the fuck alone - I want to be comatose in peace."

There were strips of iron flesh hanging from the tips, and the blood, which was the reddish-blue-black of a rotting plum, had run down his arm, but it was slightly viscous, more like Elmer's glue than oil. Meldane examined it with his nose wrinkled, like it smelled bad (and it didn't, not really; it smelled basically like rust and raw bacon, and Logan had been expecting far worse), then said imperiously, "You call this a sample?"

"Come closer and say that again."

He sighed wearily, put upon and martyred far before his time. "Oh, all right, I'll try and make do with this." He pulled something out of his pocket - it looked like a paint scraper, or the top half of a spatula - and ran it down his arm, scraping a wide swath of the blood off his forearm, using the flat edge to pull away the strips of skin. He made a mildly disgusted face, as if this was beyond sick, and scraped it all off on the counter. As an afterthought, he added, "Oh, you might want to get out there."

Logan remained on the floor, content (if not exactly happy) to stare up at the ceiling. "And why the hell should I?"

"Because you pissed it off, and it might go after innocent bystanders. But maybe you don't care."

Bastard. "You're no Wesley," he said, and while he knew it was meant as an insult, he also knew that Meldane probably wouldn't get it.

He didn't. "Pardon?"

"Just work your magic, Siegfried," he grumbled, starting to painfully pull himself up to his feet. It turned out he was laying on the remains of the desk. That was one painful frame. "I'll go distract Babe." He pulled a large splinter out of his back, and realized he did miss Wes, who would have handled things with a lot more aplomb, and never would have let him go in alone, or leave this thing alone with actual people nearby. But Meldane was just a magician, right? This wasn't his job; this wasn't what he felt he should do. He wouldn't even be here if some vampires hadn't dug up some ugly dirt on him. Honor was probably just another word to Meldane. "So, tell me. Does this thing really eat people?"

"It's certainly could. It's a scavenger; it'll eat anything. But it has a special taste for metal."

"Oh joy. So why ain't it talking? Is it a snob?"

"It can only talk to the person its bound to. You're just annoying the pig - trust me."

"I figured that out when it kicked me." Figuring he was as strong as he was going to get, he headed out the shattered front window to find the Golgoth several meters farther down the street, leaving broken asphalt and ruined cars in its wake. It wasn't rampaging through the city, which was a bonus, but its whip like tail was slapping against its own flanks in obvious irritation. "Hey," he shouted. "Hey piggy! Don't make me do that "soo-ey" shit!"

Even the intensity of its tail flicking didn't increase. It was just ignoring him now, a fly to small to bother with. But it really wasn't a good idea for it to go any further. This was a small side street, full of quaint shops for the upscale tourists; it was heading towards a worse part of London, a place where too many people were crammed into too small a space. In other words, spam in a can to a beast that would nosh on anything, including an occasional Human. He really did have to get its attention, and now.

There was a Toyota crumpled up in the middle of the street like a beer can, its back bumper warped and sticking up like the tines of a fork. He went over and used his claws to cut away what little was keeping it attached to the car, then hefted it over his shoulder and stomped after the demon pig. As soon as he felt he was close enough, but still with enough room for a good running start, he shouted, "I'm talking to you, Porky!" He threw the bumper like a spear, as hard as he could.

It didn't penetrate its metal haunch, just slammed up against it and seemed to accordion before falling to the street. But it definitely got its attention. It turned around with a noise like a buzz saw cutting through steel plate, a screech that shattered car windows and made him wince, the pressure almost too much to bear. "Yeah, ugly, c'mon, we have some things to settle," he said, starting to back up down the street. Of course, if the thing started to charge him, he'd be totally screwed, as he couldn't run fast enough to get away from something with that long of a stride, but right now it wasn't. It started towards him, snorting and otherwise sounding pissed, but didn't bother to run; it just stalked deliberately towards him, head lowered, and Logan was hit by a sense of déjà vu. He walked like that sometimes, didn't he?

He continued backing down the street, pointless as it was, still taunting the thing. "Did ya know I have a crunchy metal center? I could give you your yearly mineral allowance, better than a BMW. So what're you waitin' for? Chicken, pig?"

Perhaps he'd gone too far with the barnyard names, as the Golgoth did something extraordinary: it pounced. It must have jumped thirty feet in the air, and then came straight down, headed for him. "Oh shit," he cursed, tucking into a roll that carried him straight under the beast as it landed hard, spider webbing monster cracks through the pavement and making the ground tremble like the aftershock of a major quake. Underneath the demon pig, he looked up at its belly, and noticed something between its hindquarters he hadn't noticed before. Well, at least he knew for sure now it was a male.

It must have known it had rolled underneath to escape, he heard what could only be an aggravated snort, so he jumped up and buried a claw in its soft underbelly, hanging on for dear life as it squealed in pain and spun around fast. He dug in his second claw and planted his feet flat against its belly, hanging on like a leech. If it couldn't find him, it couldn't squish him.

But he'd forgotten about the fact that it was half-humanoid.

It sat back on its haunches, and suddenly he found himself looking up at its face as it glared down at him, him stuck on its belly like a mountain climber. He gave it a sickly half smile, wondering if this thing had a sense of humor. "Heh. You know, we don't have to fight -"

It swatted him off like a fly.

All he felt was the impact, a dull, hard one that felt like he'd just been hit with a wrecking ball. He must have lost consciousness briefly, because he had only the vaguest memory of flying through the air, and had no memory at all of landing. He woke up in a world of hurt, on top of a crumpled car, make now totally obscured since it had been demolished. He was just laying in a small pile of twisted metal and broken glass, with a giant demon warthog glaring down at him, its hot drool splattering the ground beside him, and he wondered how the hell he had reached such a low point in his life. He was a homeless drifter who made his money by beating the shit out of rednecks for the enjoyment of other rednecks for several years; sometimes he ate soup straight out of the can, didn't wash what few clothes he had for a week or two. How could he have possibly fallen lower than that?

And yet, here he was, about to be eaten by the Devil's swine. It wasn't irony more than it seemed to be a big, neon "Fuck you" from the bowels of life itself.

He'd just decided that once it got lower he could kick it in the throat - what he would do beyond that he had no idea - when suddenly it stopped snarling down at him and dipped its head, sitting back on its haunches. He looked at it in general disbelief. Not sure he wasn't unconscious and dreaming about this. "What is this shit?" he wondered, the words sounding distressingly mushy.

The demon, to his shock, answered him. Now he knew he was dreaming. "What do you require, master?"

It took him a moment to understand it was in fact speaking words, as it sounded like a toilet backing up, all burbling and bubbling. "Did … did you just call me master?"

"Yes master."

"Stop it; it's creepy."

"Yes, m - yes."

Logan got up to his knees, took a couple of deep breaths (damn, his chest hurt), and was bracing himself for actually attempting to stand when he heard the shifting of glass coming from the antique store. "So he's bound to us now?"

Meldane let out a tsk of disgust. "Not us - you."

"I thought you were bindin' it to you."

"I was, but I guess I got some of your blood when I got the sample." He was glaring at him like it was his fault.

Logan stumbled to his feet, almost instantly falling over again, but managed to shoot him a dirty look. "Then you should've gotten the sample yourself."

Meldane crossed his arms over his chest, giving him a sour, lemon sucking look. "You're going to have to ask it the questions; it won't respond to me."

He glanced at the hell pig, which still had its head bowed as if in genuflection, and Logan asked, "Who brought you here?"

"I know not his name."

"Can you lead us to him?"

"Yes."

"Then do. But wait a second."

"Why are we waiting a second?" Meldane asked.

Logan leaned over, putting his hands on his knees, and tried to catch his breath. "I wanna make sure I'm not gonna barf up my kidneys. Then we can go."

Could he have just one day when he wasn't thrown around like a demon chew toy? Was it too much to ask?

Still, he mostly recovered on the way as they got moving, the demon pig walking down the street like he honestly belonged there. The look people gave him upon seeing him was damn funny, and yet still rather British, as - since it wasn't lumbering into buildings or eating cars - no one screamed and ran away. Mainly they just stared, startled but unwilling to freak out in public. Some looked around as if searching for cameras, like this was a massive prank for a reality show, or maybe a movie.

The pig led them into a rather derelict neighbor near the waterfront, and Meldane grabbed his arm, stopping him as the pig kept on going ahead. "What?" Logan snapped, yanking his arm free from his grip.

"Don't you feel that?"

"Feel what?" But now that Meldane had said that, he opened up his senses, ignoring how bruised and warm he felt, and did get an odd sense of … what? It was just a sense of pressure and static electricity, something that prickled his skin and made his hair stand on end. He could smell nothing but saline and various polluted effluents from the riverfront, with sewage and dead fish just adding a hint of something that smelled a hell of a lot worse than the pig. "We got some bad mojo here?"

"That's one way to put it. Why don't we hang back until it looks all clear?" Although he made it sound like a suggestion, he was backing up towards the corner of a nearby building.

Logan scowled at him, but followed him reluctantly. "Think it's a trap?"

"Could be. We don't want him to think there's anything suspicious going on."

"'Cause he's that much stronger than you?"

Meldane gave him a wounded look. "I wouldn't say that …"

"No, I did."

Meldane gave him a look that could have peeled paint, and muttered under his breath, in French, "Suck my balls, you asshole."

Logan raised an eyebrow at that, and told him, also in French, "If you're going to curse a guy out, at least do it in his native language, dickhead."

He looked briefly horrified, and almost - but not quite - blushed in shame, which may have earned him some points. "You speak French."

"I'm Canadian. Even if you don't bother to learn it, you pick up a lot reading the French directions on oatmeal packets."

"Canadian? I thought you were American."

It was his turn to give him the paint peeling look. "Why do people always say that?"

"Because you're muscle; you hit things. That's considered more Yank than Canuck."

Nothing like a good old stereotype, although he supposed he had a point.

They both watched and waited behind the corner of a brick building that seemed to be some sort of warehouse, and watched as the pig approached a run down but still clearly used apartment complex. It didn't matter that the façade was obviously crumbling, the paint that remained the ugly gray of decayed organs, or that it looked like it was tilted just ever so slightly to the left - London was getting to be like New York City in that places to live were at a premium, especially affordable places to live, so even hovels that were one falling brick away from total condemnation were rented out to the rafters, with a waiting list long enough to act as a runner on the rickety staircase.

The pig got to within about thirty meters of the place when light seemed to flare around it, a golden halo like a solar flare, and then it disappeared entirely, with nary an oink. Meldane flattened himself against the wall, and Logan guessed, "That wasn't supposed to happen, was it?"

"No. He must have discovered that it was no longer bound to him, and sent him back to where he came. Shit."

"At least we know he's in there somewhere."

Meldane gave him that evil look again. "And how does that fucking help us? Do you know how many people are probably in that building right now? What are we supposed to do? Go door to door, asking _'Excuse me, are you a sorcerer?'_"

"It has the element of surprise." When Meldane continued to glare a hole right through him, he shook his head. "You have no sense of humor at all, do you?"

"This is no time for jokes."

"It's always time for jokes. It's better than cryin'." He started walking down the narrow, piss reeking alley, parsing out the scents of rat shit, various discarded garbage, and methamphetamine residue (yeah, this was a classy neighborhood), when he stopped cold, aware he was picking up a sharp, fresh scent.

Fear.

The alley ended in a piece of chain link fence, but it was torn down the middle, with a large chunk taken out of the side, although it looked like it dead ended shortly afterwards in a concrete wall that was part of an old loading dock area. But as he approached it warily, he stuck his head through the gap in the fence and looked both ways, to see if it went off to the side, maybe towards a connecting alley.

A pipe came swinging down towards his face.

They were fast, but he was faster, and besides, he'd been waiting for something like this. He caught the pipe before it could connect, and wrenched it out of his would be attacker's hands as he pushed through the gap in the fence. "How friendly is that?" he asked, as the woman backed up, away from him. Scratch that - not a woman, a girl.

She was maybe all of sixteen, five four, hundred and thirty five pounds, not so much overweight as having a stocky build, solid as opposed to frail. She looked Pakistani in origin, with an olive complexion, naturally wavy black hair (that was, by virtue of exposure to the high humidity dockside, a bit frizzy), and large black eyes that gave her the expression of a startled doe. She was wearing dirt stained jeans, battered Nikes, a dark blue Muse t-shirt, and a worn brown leather jacket that looked about a size and a half too big for her. "Stay back," she said, reaching into her coat pocket and pulling out a utility knife.

Her fear was bright and acrid as vinegar, and the problem here was obvious. He tossed the pipe away and held up his hands to show he was unarmed (okay, a lie, but one everyone believed if they hadn't seen the claws), and didn't make any moves towards her, sudden or otherwise. No, she couldn't hurt him long with a utility knife, even if she went straight for the jugular, but she could inadvertently hurt herself. Utility knives were very sharp, and you could slice most of a finger off without ever really feeling it. "I'm not gonna hurt you. My name's Logan; what's yours?"

She swallowed hard, her look still suspicious, and she jumped slightly when Meldane looked through the fence and snapped, "What the hell is this? Hitting on the crack whores?"

"I am not a crack whore!" The girl replied sharply, all angry, wounded dignity. Her accent was more Midlands, maybe Yorkshire, than London. "Who the fuck are you?"

"Would you believe he's Meldane the Magnificent?" Logan told her.

Meldane's dark eyes narrowed to slits. "You had to give her my actual name? Well, at least I can cast a spell to make her forget."

"Spell?" She repeated, looking between them warily. "Are you friends of Glenn?"

That was such a curious thing to say, Logan wondered why she was scared before they even ducked into the alley. She smelled permeated with fear, like she hadn't showered in a while and had been marinating in her own terror. His guess would be the sight of the hell swine, but no, she'd been afraid long before he'd shown up. Something bad was going on down here, and he would have bet his left nut she knew something about it.

"Glenn?" Logan repeated. "He have something to do with that big pig thing?" Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Meldane's eyes widen in sudden curiosity. He understood what he was trying to get at here.

She shrugged a single shoulder, trying to feign nonchalance while at the same time holding the utility knife on both of them. That was a difficult task. "If you know him, don't you know?"

"No, 'cause we don't know him," he told her, lowering his hands to his sides. She aimed the utility knife at him for that, but he didn't care. "But we are after him."

She remained tense, guarded, and he could see the dark circles under her eyes, the slightly ashen undertone to her tan skin. She was exhausted, riding the ragged edge of complete and utter collapse; adrenaline was probably the only thing keeping her functioning (and couldn't he sympathize with that). "After him? What do you mean?"

"I mean we want to kick his fucking ass," he admitted, as he thought that was what she wanted to hear. The fact that it was the truth was almost secondary. "Do you know why he's killing so many damn people? What's the point?"

He saw doubt flit through her eyes, relief warring with fear that she was being played. It was unclear which won out. "I don't … I don't know why he's doing what he's doing. Who are you guys? Are you … did you used to be Watchers?"

Meldane chuckled. "They're dead, honey."

"Not all of them," Logan replied, and she looked at him with a strange kind of hope. Did she think he meant he was one of them? He suddenly wondered if he could fake it. "We don't want to hurt you. What we want to do is stop this man before he kills any more people. Will you help us?"

He then wondered if a girl this wired and this freaked out could be much help at all. But sometimes frantic help was better than no help at all.


	7. Part 7

6

What a weird, weird place Los Angeles was.

He couldn't find the Way Station listed anywhere, but right there, front and center in the L.A. phone book, was the number and address for the Church of the Stone Temple, the place where Rags was head priest and chief bottle washer. Now why would a church devoted to the worship of Gorgons be completely out in the open while a bar wouldn't be? Weird.

The "church" was even stranger still. It was in West Hollywood, and apparently set up inside an old record store, and in the front display window that might have once displayed U2's latest album there was instead a small diorama made of stone, or at least Styrofoam made to look like stone. There was something like a granite miniature of Stonehenge with the scattered ruin of something like the Roman coliseum, with fake ivy and assorted vines crawling over the Styrofoam rubble like nature was already claiming it for its own. There was also a small pillar in the center, with carvings depicting three snake haired women holding swords, and atop the pillar was one of those garden gazing balls that seemed to be the twenty first century equivalent of garden gnomes.

The glass front door had "The Church Of The Stone Temple" painted on it in small green script, along with a blessing in tiny white script in the lower right corner: 'May the Holy Sisters bless all who pass through here'.

Scott wanted to dismiss this all as New Age hokum, and already felt the scoff forming in his throat, even though he knew the Sisters existed in some form, and not only that, they had probably saved his life once. But it was really hard to feel indebted to them somehow. Gorgons, real? Gorgons as gods? He found himself thinking of that awful film he saw once as a kid - what was it called? Clash of The Titans? There Medusa was a stop animation hag, with hair made of angry snakes. The Gorgons didn't even have snake hair, although it did seem to move strangely and of its own accord; they were also, from what little he could remember, breathtakingly beautiful, as long as they didn't open their eyes.

Inside, the record shop walls had been covered with marble patterned wallpaper, and the lights were low, so it was like entering a cave, with many stone altars and burning candles, and just a few benches for sitting down. The air was rife with incense, but a mild kind that wasn't cloying, and almost appealing. At the back of the store - the front of the church - was a life sized statue of a tall, shapely woman wearing the kind of loose, long robe that women of ancient Rome were generally depicted as wearing. A sash around her waist emphasized her hips, and there was a single shoulder strap holding the robe up, so you could see the top of her right breast, but just enough to be tantalizing. Her face was beautiful, very delicately featured, her hair thick and falling to her shoulders like a lion's mane, and she held a sword over her head in a gesture somewhere between a movie studio's logo and an executioner about to deliver a killing blow. But the strangest thing was her eyes.

They were carved in all right, but her eyes were covered with a thick swath of color, a bright jade strip that covered her eyes from lower lids to the spot where her eyebrows would be if the artist had added them, with a thin line of black at the top and bottom edges. He remembered the Gorgons he supposedly caught a glimpse of each had a band of color covering their eyes, but only when closed. Did that mean something? Was it cosmetic, like he initially assumed, or was it actually some kind of odd coloring, like a strange birthmark? An actual physical effect of their power? Something to help contain their powers, like his visor kept him from obliterating everything he looked at? Was that some kind of mystical visor equivalent? Wow - just considering it made him feel weird. That, and the fact that he found a marble statue physically attractive.

Of course, things just got worse from there.

Someone came out from the back - he didn't know there was a back - and commented on Medusa being a real hottie, and the voice was distressingly familiar. His stomach burned with a sudden shock of anxiety as it was followed up with, "Holy shit - Mr. Summers?"

It was Brendan.

But, while it was mildly embarrassing to see him, it was also good to see him. He looked well, and seemed to have grown two inches since he had seen him last (ah, the wonders of being a teenager).

Scott suggested they go down to the coffee shop on the corner, mainly so he never had to admit the Medusa statue was indeed a "hottie". (How long had it been since he'd been with Jean? Oh no, that was not an avenue to think about right now ...)

At the coffee shop, Brendan caught him up on his life. He was sharing an apartment with a struggling actor/half demon who could pass for Human named Alejandro, whose claim to fame was a non-speaking role in a big film, where he was billed in the credits as "Skateboard punk". Apparently, this was a big deal - or at least Brendan was impressed.

Brendan himself still wasn't sure what he wanted to do with his life, but at Alejandro's request recently went to an open casting audition for a "Real World" type series where they were looking for a young mutant to move in with the "regular" cast. Brendan didn't think he'd get it because his mutation wasn't really "visual enough" (in his words the "teal spiky thing" - of course that was actually his demon side, but he didn't mention that, because, quote: "People know there's mutants out; no one knows there's demons out there."), but did like the idea of free rent, and said he'd gotten a glimpse of the house in Santa Monica, and it was really cool. He also thought it would be a move for mutant tolerance, to show they're just like anyone else, but Scott was a bit dubious about that. Reality shows enjoyed the "freak of the week" mentality just like any talk show, only they had a tendency to stretch that week out to a season. He would hate to see anyone, especially Brendan, exploited like that.

Apparently everyone at the Stone Temple was "really cool", and he'd made some good friends. Rags was a nice guy when you could understand him, and when he wasn't drunk, which he was on pretty much any given evening. He was a nice drunk, but Brendan was worried about his obvious alcoholism, which made Scott have to suppress a smile.

What a good kid. And Brendan was, very much so, in spite of his rough upbringing. God, the kid, by all rights, should have been a jaded monster, and if he was who could have blamed him? Drug addicted mother, currently incarcerated, raised in foster homes where he was abused, a street kid who probably had done his share of awful things to get by, and yet there was very little cynicism about him. He was even looking after the hot tempered and immature Matt when he and Storm initially picked them up at Grand Central Station - and Matt when on to prove that he couldn't survive a minute without Brendan. That was still a terrible thing to think about, and the uncomfortable, unspoken thing that neither of them mentioned, but knew was there anyways, like an invisible guest at the table.

He had such high hopes for Brendan. He was a natural leader, and a natural survivor, whose first instinct was to protect the weakest of his group, simply because he knew he was strong. And he was strong, and brave, and he had the ability to think on his feet; his actual mutant ability, eidetic memory, probably helped immeasurably there. But Scott knew now that maybe he'd help frighten him off, simply because he fast tracked him so soon, so clearly made him an X-Man candidate before Brendan felt he was ready for it.

The weird thing was, he felt a kind of connection with Brendan, maybe because they had both spent time in foster homes. Of course, he wasn't abused - some of the places weren't great, but he was never burned with iron or sexually exploited - and didn't spend as long in them as Brendan had, but it was still a kind of bond that people who hadn't been through it wouldn't understand.

Still, could he and Brendan be more different? Brendan was still bisexual, half-demon, and attracted to Logan, all of which seemed rather baffling to him, and he knew Brendan probably thought he was way too tightly wound. Maybe he was. But he liked this kid, and he could see greatness for him ... but not out here, not living with glorified extras and working as a waiter in a restaurant in Glendale.

He wanted to ask him to come back to the school, but he knew he couldn't push it. If he needed time to think, fine, but he hoped he didn't take much longer.

Scott told him what hotel he was staying at (he did get a room, as that was part of his overall plan with Bob) so he could drop by and give him a letter for Rogue; apparently they had been corresponding pretty regularly, which was good - connection to the school - although what wasn't good was the fact that Rogue had expressed some interest in moving out to L.A., a wish she hadn't shared with anyone else. And even though he hadn't said it, Brendan gave him a weak smile over his latte, and said, "I haven't given up completely, Mr. Summers. I just ... I need more time, y'know?"

To come back to the school. Scott thought he was humoring him by saying that, giving him a smidgen of hope, which was just further proof of how nice a kid he was.

Brendan asked him why he was in Los Angeles, and that left him in a terrible position. He told him he was hoping to see Bob about something, which was true at least, but he had no idea where to look for him. Of course, Brendan knew where the Way Station was, and offered to take him there, which gave Scott a savage attack of sudden guilt. He didn't want to use Brendan for this, or any kid. If Brendan found out, he'd never trust him again. But then Brendan said: "It's a good thing you ran into me. You'd never get in on your own."

"What? Why?"

"It's shielded from regular Humans. You would walk past it and never see it." He shrugged. "I guess a lot of demon bars are that way. We like our privacy."

Was that why it wasn't in the phone book? The Stone Temple was a church, open to all, but the Way Station was more picky about its clientele? He didn't think Bob was picky about anything.

As soon as they were done with their lattes, Brendan took him to the Way Station.

It wasn't in the bad part of town; it was in the obliterated part of town. The part that got massively torn up and burned out by the '90's L.A. riots and never rebuilt in any way, shape, or form; it was like it existed to serve as a warning for others, and a living reminder that even normal Humans couldn't get along with each other, that the stupidest, most inconsequential things could divide them. And if something as marginal as race could almost destroy a city, what hope did you have when the differences were much more extreme?

The building Brendan led him to was a crumbling, derelict brick structure with boarded up windows and obvious char marks, seemingly held together by '_This Property Is Condemned' _signs. It had to be a joke. "There's no way this is the Way Station," he protested.

But Brendan just grinned, and said, "See what I mean by normal people being unable to find it?"

He grabbed his arm as he pulled him right up to it, and Scott felt something … unusual. It was like a mild, unseen pressure, as if the smog had solidified to a gelatin like consistency, and suddenly the building before them was intact. But no less a seedy bar, with the thud of a bass line bizarrely audible, as if the music had started that very second.

What the hell was this? There was no way it was a hologram.

Brendan shoved open the heavy wooden door, and they were instantly assailed by a cloud of cigarette smoke, and the aggressive rhymes of Public Enemy. It was a dark bar, as disreputable as anything in a Raymond Chandler novel, but populated by demons instead of men in fedoras and sexy dames. In fact, many of the demons were of such an inhuman stripe they could give a person nightmares for years. For example, he saw a demon sitting at the near table, blue as sky, with claw like fingers and absolutely no eyes to speak of (or at least not on his face), but a mouth twice as large as any Human's, with double the number of saw like teeth.

And all these things turned to look at them as they came in, but most looked away again, uninterested, save for a few that stared at him hungrily. Brendan was here enough that they recognized him? That was a bit disturbing.

Behind the bar was a very large Samoan man - or at least a demon that resembled a large Samoan man - and Brendan gave him a familiar nod as he said, "Hey Lau - Helga in?"

The man, who was cleaning a beer mug with what looked like a chamois, simply nodded and then jerked his head off to the left, where it looked like there was a small hall and a series of back rooms. Brendan told him, "Wait here. I'll just be a sec." Without waiting for an acknowledgement of any sort, he went off that way, and Scott found himself alone at the bar.

"Get you something?" The man Brendan called Lau asked.

He shook his head, not trusting a drink in a demon bar, and the big guy just shrugged and wandered away.

"Those Ferragamo?" Someone said, and it took Scott a moment to connect it to the demon at the end of the bar, one with a rather impressive rack of antlers.

"What?"

"Ferragamo?" The demon tapped the area just beside his eye, apparently indicating his visor. "La Perla? Maui Jim?"

This made no sense at all to Scott, but he guessed he was asking him what brand of sunglasses they were. Rather than tell him they weren't sunglasses, he simply said, "Xavier."

The demon with the antler shook his head, and it looked like he might fall off his barstool; he was that top heavy, and that intoxicated. "Never heard of 'em. French?"

Before Scott was forced to continue this conversation, Helga appeared, and said, "You might as well get over here, Summers." She patted Brendan on the shoulder, and said, "He's got his serious face on, so you might wanna get outta here."

Brendan sighed. "I guess so. You make sure he gets home okay?"

"Yeah, no problem. Now get home and none of this Batman shit, hear me?"

Brendan grimaced, but nodded reluctantly. "Yeah, yeah." He paused on his way past him, and said, "It was good seeing you again, Mister Summers. See you tomorrow?"

"Of course. Take care of yourself." He held out his hand to shake it, but Brendan hugged him, which startled him momentarily, but he hugged him in return, giving him an encouraging pat on the back. It was weird, as he wasn't a "huggy" type of person, but it all fell back to that continuous thought, that Brendan was a good kid, and he did miss him at the school. It was unlikely a single hug would convince him to come back, but it was a nice gesture.

As soon as Brendan pulled away and left the bar, Scott looked at Helga curiously. "Batman shit? What did you mean by that?"

She waited until he was closer to the back table she had apparently selected as their meeting place before replying. "You taught him well at that mutant school of yours, Boy Scout. He still plays hero in his free time, mainly defending various people against big bad demons. Angel's gone and Logan's not here, so he decided to take it upon himself to fill the gap."

"What? Are you serious? How in the hell can you let him do that? He's just -"

"I don't let him do anything," she snapped back testily. "I ain't his mom. He's a stubborn teenager who feels a little less helpless beating the shit out of vampires, ones kind of like the one that killed his ex-boyfriend. Who am I to deny him that simple pleasure?" She straddled a chair at the table, sitting back and staring at him with frosty green eyes. "Welcome to the jungle, baby."

Scott roughly pulled out a chair across from her and sat down, scowling in displeasure. Public Enemy had given way to Tori Amos, which was a little better, at least in the throbbing, headache inducing noise department. But then it occurred to him what she had said - she had said Angel was gone, and yet specified Logan wasn't here. They didn't mean the same thing. "Angel's gone? As in dead?"

Helga studied him curiously for a moment, tail flicking behind her like a student waving for attention. "Logan didn't tell you? Huh. Well, I guess he wouldn't, would he? Angel kinda took an unexpected vacation in another dimension, and a couple of days ago, the Sisters told me they no longer got any sense of him. Which means …" She drew a finger across her throat in a slitting gesture.

He sat back, honestly stunned. He didn't know him that well, and he instinctively didn't like him because he was a friend of Logan's as well as a vampire, but he still felt a small twinge in his gut that another person he knew, however peripherally, was dead Everyone seemed to be dying around him. As vampires went, he didn't seem that bad at all, especially when compared to the likes of the Sisters. "How's Wesley taking it?" He asked.

From the look on her face, he had surprised her. She shook her head and rubbed her forehead. "Holy shit, he told you nothing, did he?"

"What? Did Wesley go with him? Is he … is he dead too?"

She sighed and nodded in confirmation. Now he really felt sick. Wesley was at least Human, and had impressed the Professor enough with his defense of the mansion to offer him a slot in the X-Men. Xavier had _never _offered a slot to a non-mutant before or since. "Holy shit. When did this … when did this all happen? Why didn't Logan tell us?"

"He probably didn't think any of you would care. They were his friends, not yours."

"That isn't true. Well, okay, maybe in Angel's case, but not Wesley's." Did he really need another reason to resent Logan at this point? He was almost tired of doing it; it seemed to take up too much time and energy. "He could have at least told us."

"Take that up with him. But before you completely lose your nut, keep in mind he's recently lost his girlfriend and his daughter. He ain't in the greatest emotional state right now."

"Is he ever?" But even as he said that, he knew it wasn't completely fair. She was right in the fact that a lot of people had died on Logan recently, more than had died around him, but he just figured Logan was used to death. He dished it out, he wallowed in it, he lived with it as his only true companion. He seemed like he didn't really care if someone died or not. Or did he? Logan usually went into seclusion when something like this happened, like an injured animal holing up in a dark cave until it heals. How did you judge someone's level of grief when they weren't even there?

"I doubt this is what you came here to talk about," Helga finally prompted, impatiently changing the subject.

Did she care about death at all? She seemed to kill quite a few people at Mirror Lake. Whether she had needed to or not - how much of it was "self-defense" - was debatable. But she was a demon, and maybe that gave her an excuse. It was difficult to shift from his shocked state to an emotionally neutral one, but he'd had many years of training. He could shunt his emotions aside when they weren't helping him, such as now. "I need to see Bob."

"Well, don't we all?" she replied coolly, her tail picking up a beer glass from a neighboring table and bringing it to her. The man was clearly passed out, snoring faintly face down on the table, and he'd never miss it. "But why the hell do you need to see Bob? I thought you hated his guts."

"I don't hate him," he lied. "I don't … care for him much, but that's not hate."

She glared at him like she didn't quite believe him, and she probably didn't, but it wasn't vital that she did. Still, he couldn't ignore her completely, as you underestimated her at your peril, as Mirror Lake had proved. Maybe this wasn't exactly a perfect film noir bar, but she was definitely a femme fatale. "Uh huh. So why do you wanna see him?"

His best bet was to stick to the truth as much as possible, as they expected that of him anyways. "I've … I think Jean's been contacting me. She's trying to tell me something, but I'm not sure what."

"So why not talk to Xavier about this? Why Bob?"

"How could I talk to the Professor about this? He can't help me. She's trying to tell me something, but she's not telling me directly, and I don't understand what I'm getting. Bob understands this god crap, doesn't he?"

She narrowed her eyes, studying him intently as she gulped down the beer she had stolen. He couldn't read her expression very well, as when it wasn't neutral or sly, it was ticked off. After a moment, she set the empty glass down with a thunk, and said, "Look, if you're looking for a quick fix, you'll need to go elsewhere. Bob's off in another dimension, and time runs different in each one. He may think he's been gone for an hour, but here that could be a year and a half. I have no idea when he's coming back."

He nodded, a little disappointed by the answer but not terribly surprised. He pulled out the business card he picked up from the hotel, and quickly scribbled his room number on it. It wasn't a fancy place, but he was certainly paying for it like it was. (Oh well, that's what credit cards were for, right?) "I should be here for a couple of days. If he drops back in, tell him to come by, okay?"

He slid it across the table and she picked it up, looking at it for longer than seemed necessary before nodding reluctantly. "Yeah, I'll let him know. Couldn't afford a better hotel?"

"At least it doesn't rent by the hour." He stood up, finished here and already getting a mild headache from the cigarette smoke and loud music. Tori Amos had given way to a rather raucous number from Faith No More, which seemed like a perfect band for Bob. Just the name alone fit.

"You might want to grab your kid and take him home with you," Helga said, making him pause.

"My kid? Do you mean Brendan?"

"Yeah, I do." She sighed wearily, shoving the hotel card in the back pocket of her jeans. "The kid's been lucky so far, but it can't last. He's good, I'll give him that, and thanks to his ability to remember every damn thing he's ever seen, he can replicate Jet Li moves after seeing them once, but it's just a matter of time before it becomes irrelevant. He's been getting into scraps with younger and newer vamps, but he's just half Brachen - while he's stronger than a Human, he's just average for a demon, and the older the vamp, the tougher and smarter they are. Eventually some century old bugger will meet him in a back alley and rip his heart out of his chest. He'd better than you'd expect, really, I've seen him in action, but he's no Slayer, and he doesn't have the long time fighting skills or preternatural healing abilities of either Angel or Logan. I was thinking of having Bob give him a push so he'd get the fuck out of here before I had to scrape him off the sidewalk as road kill. Just take him back with you when you go, okay?"

It was a chilling thought. He always thought Brendan was smarter than that … but then again, she had pointed out everything relevant: he was a teenager, one with a grudge against vampires, one who knew he was stronger than average, and one who never sat back and let other people take care of a problem. He would fight until he was dead, if only because he was so damn pigheaded. "I'll do my best."

And he would, because it seemed like more than enough people had died recently, and he didn't want Brendan, who had so much promise, to be just another casualty.

7

Her name was Asha Rahman, and this was all her fault.

Okay, no, it wasn't, but she had let some super-secret Watcher book fall into Glenn's hand, which was apparently the catalyst for this mess. Meldane wanted to retreat until they figured out what exactly was going on, and he thought that was a good idea, but only because he wanted to know exactly what they were facing. It was hard to have a battle strategy when you had no idea who your opponent was. Also, the only thing Meldane seemed "magnificent" at was annoying the shit out of him. They needed a better spellcaster, and they needed it now.

The only thing to do to Asha was get her out of here, and since there really was no other place to take her, they went back to Ruby's. the sun was up, so presumably she was as well, in a humanoid form, but Logan had no guarantees she wouldn't kill him on sight. So while he knocked on the door and called out her name, he quickly stepped behind Meldane and Asha as she opened the door.

She seemed shocked upon seeing them, and quickly hid something behind her back. Logan thought he heard it clunk heavily behind the door, and he suddenly wondered if she kept a hatchet in the house.

Although still clearly pissed off, and wearing only a purple silk robe that probably cost more than everyone else's wardrobe combined, she let them in, and Logan went off to make Asha some tea, because she needed relax before she snapped, and he needed to get away from Ruby's fiery death stare.

Asha at least seemed duly impressed that Ruby used to be a Watcher, and that alone seemed to relax her. Just from what she was able to tell her, Ruby deduced it certainly wasn't the demon Haggoth they were dealing with, the ones the kids were clearly trying to raise. According to Ruby, Haggoth was a hedonistic demon, very much into avarice and gluttony, a favorite of corporate CEO's, robber barons, and the terminally repressed everywhere. In spite of what the kids read, Haggoth really didn't give the ones it used "eternal youth" - it kept them alive for a long time, usually, but youth wasn't a part of the actual package, just a lure to bring the suckers in. Haggoth wasn't big into the killing, but only because there usually wasn't any money in it, or enough money to make it worthwhile. At its core, it was an amazingly lazy demon. A bit of a shame, actually, because according to Ruby, it was really easy to send packing.

So that left open the question of what the hell had taken over Glenn. The problem was, without more details, there was about a hundred possibilities. The fact that it seemed to rapidly age its victims narrowed things down a bit, but Ruby knew of none offhand with that ability that also possessed Humans, so she had to go hit her own collection of books. Perhaps wisely, she went off to her bedroom to look at them there, away from prying teenage eyes.

Meldane was pacing, occasionally stopping to look out the window, and he so clearly didn't want to be here Logan was on the verge of throwing him out, preferably through the wall. Asha had relaxed a little, and thanked him for the tea, but she looked remarkably weary. He was pretty sure they were on a pass out countdown right now.

After sipping her orange pekoe and having a good look around Ruby's cozy yet subtly eerie front room, she asked, "Why is there blood on that couch?"

That even made Meldane turn around and look. Logan grimaced sheepishly, and admitted, "That's my fault. I recovered here from a fight last night -" he pulled up a bit of his torn shirt, to show her the bloodstains "- and I bled on it a bit. I haven't exactly had time to go home and change."

Asha looked him up and down cautiously, then asked, "Is that why she looks like she wants to have at you with a chainsaw?"

Exhausted or not, she was still amazingly perceptive.

As if on cue, he heard a door slam shut, and Ruby emerged from her bedroom, now wearing jeans and a very old, tattered Smiths t-shirt (She was a Smiths fan? He'd never have guessed), and carrying a very old, leather bound book that she was still reading as she entered the room. "Okay - if I'm right, we're in bigger trouble than I initially thought."

Great. Now he bet his weekend was shot to hell.


	8. Part 8

"How can things possibly be worse?" Meldane replied bitterly. "I mean, have you been paying attention? Giant demon pig downtown, mad demigods in Hyde Park, and some demon possessed berk killing kids. How does it get worse than that?"

She gave him a disdainful look that was slightly worse than the one she gave him earlier. "I think it's Anzu, that's how it gets worse."

"Who?" Asha asked, looking nervously around at all of them. "Apu? Like the guy on the Simpsons?"

Logan coughed to cover a laugh he couldn't quite swallow.

"Anzu. The Babylonian version of the Sumero-Akkadian demigod Zu. In legends it's a sort of personal valet to a supreme god, but ultimately betrays said god for "tablets of destiny" that gave it control over everything. Half Human and half-demon bird, it was almost impossible to kill, and while it was eventually slain, it was after a terrible, drawn out battle."

"Bird?" Meldane repeated in disbelief. "It's a fucking bird?"

"No. That's the legend, and as you know, sometimes you're lucky to find a single grain of truth in there. As far as we can tell, Anzu - or Zu, whatever you wanted to call him - was the offspring between a Human and a rather powerful demon god, possibly Kingu. His humanity damned him as weak, in spite of his father, so supposedly he got a hold of some artifact that amplified his power and obliterated his Human side … well, physically, at any rate. He did try and set up his own kingdom, somewhere in current day Romania, but a rather bizarre and violent seismic event swallowed up his keep in its entirely, crushing the artifact that amplified his power, and entombing him in stone half a mile beneath the earth." She slammed the book shut, and tossed it on her bloodstained settee. "Rumor was he finally pissed off more powerful gods, either the Powers That Be or his own father, Kingu."

"There's gotta be more than that," Logan interjected. "How the hell does he go from being a statue buried under Bucharest to possessing a kid in London? It doesn't track."

Ruby crossed her arms over her chest and gave him an imperious look. "Yes, it does. Because of his unique energy matrix, Kingu actually can't exist for long in this dimension except under very special circumstances; it's like reality spits him back out. When Anzu obliterated his physically Human half, he was only held in this dimension by the artifact. With its destruction, it wasn't long before he was spat out in another dimension, but he couldn't come back here, because he was half the demon his father was."

Asha rubbed her forehead, and just from the way she was grimacing, she was having a hard time assimilating this, believing this, or both. "Umm, okay. This is all real, is it?"

They ignored her, but not out of spite. They just didn't have time for the newbie. "So how the hell is he back here now?" Logan demanded.

Everything about Ruby's body language was tight, tense, like she was a coiled spring, a predator preparing to pounce. It didn't bode well for any of this conversation. "That's problem number two."

Meldane groaned dramatically, turning back towards the window. "Just cut the shit and give us all the bad news at once, okay?" He pulled a pack of Galois out of his back pocket, and started searching for a light.

"Try and smoke those things in here, and I will gouge your eye out with a soup spoon and make you eat it."

"Merde," he muttered under his breath, shoving the pack back in his pocket.

"The problem is, there's no way in hell that the ritual to call up Haggoth would end up with you calling up Anzu. He's on a completely different level, both power wise and dimensionally. It would have required a separate ritual, and an experienced spellcaster."

Asha looked like a deer in the headlights again, and shifted uncomfortably. "I swear, we thought we were getting Haggoth. None of us knew what the bloody hell we were doing in the first place. I thought this was all shit!"

Ruby's look was scolding, a stern and unhappy teacher. "I'm sure that would've disappointed your parents. Did you think they were full of shit?"

She looked equally chagrined and hopeful, an interesting mix. "No! But did you … did you know my parents?"

"Personally? No. But I've heard of the Rahmans, and they were highly respected. I doubt they'd have been pleased you were mixed up in this."

"Hey," Logan interrupted, as Asha looked down at her folded hands, clearly trying not to cry. "She's a kid. They're allowed to do stupid things; it's part of growing up. She didn't know any of this was real, no one told her, so if you want to blame anyone, blame her parents for thinking they could protect her from all of this with ignorance."

Ruby switched her glare to him, but he glared right back, unimpressed. "Now, who could have set these kids up, and why?"

Meldane, unable to smoke, was now fidgeting, tapping his fingers against his thigh and shifting his weight from foot to foot. Logan was on the verge of getting up and hitting him, although he supposed if he waited a minute, Ruby would help him, and they could beat him down together. It might be a bonding experience. "The most obvious thing would be the book was planted, but there'd be no guarantee she would find it."

"Too complicated," Ruby replied dismissively. "We have to apply Occam's Razor here, which leaves us with two possibilities: the spell was switched after she came into possession of the book, by accident or deliberately. And clearly there was someone else with you there at the cemetery that night."

Asha looked up, startled, wiping away a tear with the back of her hand. "There wasn't. I mean, it's a small cemetery, we would have seen -"

"No you wouldn't have," Meldane interrupted. "If they were a powerful mage, you wouldn't have seen them if they didn't wish to be seen."

"There must have been someone there," Ruby agreed. "There's no way kids fucking around could have called up Anzu, even if you performed the ritual to a tee. Someone used a great deal of power to release Anzu, and used Glenn as a sacrificial lamb, making him the vessel for Anzu's return to this plane."

A quizzical look clouded her face. "Vessel? Do you mean he's more than possessed?"

Ruby scoffed, shaking her head. "Yes, I do. Anzu is a demigod, technically. They obliterate. Glenn is his new Human half, meaning there's no Glenn anymore, just Anzu setting up shop in his flesh."

"So why would someone bring Anzu back? What's the benefit?" Logan wondered.

Ruby made a small noise of amusement, and let her arms fall to her side before turning around and walking back towards her kitchen. The fact that she now felt like roaming wasn't an encouraging sign. "That's just it - I don't know. Kill people, sow seeds of panic … that's about it."

"What are his powers exactly?" Logan asked. "What can Anzu do?"

She turned back to face them, her lips twisting as if trying to hold back a sad, disdainful laugh. "Well, he can tap into a person's time - the time people have left to live - and siphon it off for his own use; it's like food to him."

"The rapidly aged kids," Meldane murmured.

"And conjure up Golgoth demons?"

She shook her head. "He can't do that. In fact, he wouldn't do that; it would have no use to him."

"What about dismember vampires?" Logan asked, aware that this wasn't fitting at all. There was a huge piece of the puzzle missing, and from the frustration in Ruby's expression, she knew it too.

That earned a shrug. "Well, possibly. He is a demigod, after all. But here's the thing - he could steal their time away from them, and kill them in a spectacularly new way. And since most vampires can live for centuries, you'd think that would be a food trough he'd jump in."

"Vampires actually do exist?" Asha asked, surprised.

Meldane shook his head and frown down at the carpet, as if it was all its fault. "This makes no fucking sense."

"No kidding," Ruby agreed in disgust. "The mage is the key."

"He - or she - is the big bad here," Logan concurred, seeing where she was going with this. It was the missing piece, the only thing that could possibly make this all come together into a coherent whole. "They're doing something, and they needed Anzu. But what the fuck could they be doing?"

Ruby threw her hands up in frustration. "I seriously hope you're not asking me."

Logan sat forward, resting his head in his hands, trying to think. There had to be something, something they were missing. They couldn't have come so far, and yet slid backwards to the beginning in record time.

"I need a smoke," Meldane said, heading for the door. No one rushed to stop him.

"What was the point of the Golgoth?" Logan asked Ruby. "What was that thing supposed to do? What could it do?"

Meldane paused at the door, sighing like all the burdens had been just dumped on his desk on Friday, and just ten minutes before quitting time as well. "I told you, Golgoths are familiars for powerful sorcerers."

"Meaning what precisely? What do they do for them?"

Ruby sat down on the edge of the bloody settee, careful to avoid any obvious stains, and grabbed her own knees tightly, clearly needing something to do with her hands. "They help them contact other demonic presences, and channel copious amounts of power."

"Fine. Would a guy who could call up Anzu and channel the energy of Kali need that?"

Silence descended with a strange heaviness, and the four of them exchanged questioning glances. That was the right question to ask, apparently, although it really just complicated matters. After a moment, Ruby sighed and sagged back, her posture giving way to total defeat. "We are so fucked."

"I'm not sure I understand any of this," Asha said hesitantly.

"Join the club, sweetheart," Meldane replied darkly.

Ruby sat up, steeling herself. "What this needs is research. Asha, you want to help end this? Help me. Okay?"

Asha nodded. "Sure, whatever I can do to help."

"I have appointments," Meldane lied, so blatantly it was almost insulting. But no one actually cared if he went, so everyone was cool with it. "I'll be back later. Ring me if we get a clue."

"Wait up," Logan told him, levering himself off the good sofa. "You're giving me a lift to Chelsea."

He gave him an annoyed look over his shoulder, lips pursing as if he'd just bitten into something sour. "Since when?"

"Since now." He turned to Ruby, and said, "I really gotta clean up, but once I do I'm gonna start following the only lead we have."

She raised an eyebrow at that. "Glenn?"

He nodded tersely. "If Anzu is working with someone, they will meet at some point. I'll see if he leads me anywhere."

"You do know he's a demigod, yes? If he gets any sense that he's been watched or followed -"

"I know, I'm death on toast. He won't know."

Meldane scoffed. "Oh, won't he? How do you figure you can stalk a homicidal demigod without him catching on?"

He wanted to say something really bitchy, related to what a piss poor spellcaster he was, but it didn't seem worth the effort. He was pathetic, and would always be pathetic, and pointing it out was like taunting the sky for being blue. "Because tracking is one of the things I do best. All I need is to catch his scent once, and he's mine."

"Catch his scent?" Asha repeated. "You're being figurative, right?"

"No, he's not," Ruby informed her, standing up. "Our friend Logan here is something of a bloodhound. It's part of what he brings to the team."

"The other half is beating the shit out of things," Meldane added unnecessarily, a smug smirk on his face.

"I can demonstrate," he snapped.

Meldane simply opened the door and started out, the coward, while Ruby said, "Don't you dare get any more blood in my bloody house, fuckhole. Take it outside."

"Fuckhole?" He repeated, unable to suppress a chuckle. "Are you comin' on to me?"

He just managed to get out of the cottage before she threw something at him, but from the force with which it hit the door, he was very lucky it didn't shatter the wood and keep on going. He knew damn well he was digging a grave with her, but sometimes it was so damn fun to tick off the snobby.

Although Meldane complained half the way, he drove him to Chelsea, dropping him off a block from King's Road so he could avoid some of the traffic. Which was fine by him, as he wasn't sure he wanted Meldane to know where Srina lived.

He kept sifting through the data in his head, but so far little added up. So somebody - call him Gandalf - brought Anzu back, and set him loose in London, while he went around calling up giant pigs and draining Kali's energy off into gods knew where. To what purpose? What the hell was he accomplishing? Had he made a deal with Anzu for something? What?

And, more to the point - why use Asha and her friends? It was quite possibly just a coincidence, something he came upon and took advantage of, but he didn't trust coincidences off hand. And how curious that she was a Watcher's daughter too. This wasn't sitting right at all. The possibility of revenge surfaced in his mind, and he wondered if Anna kept detailed records on the exploits of the Rahmans.

It was well into the morning by the time he pounded up the stairs towards Srina's place, the morning gridlock providing many irritating background honks, but he could hear music bleeding from Srina's flat. Just catching the bass line, he knew it was The Delays again. She had bought (? Well, okay, knowing her she stole it) the CD recently, and it was on heavy rotation, so much so that he felt he actually knew the entire album by heart now. It was shimmery, sunny Brit alt pop, not really his type of thing, but he had to admit that they had recorded some of the prettiest, most ethereal harmonies he had heard in years. Also, some of the songs had started to grow on him, a bit like a fungus, so when she was gone he liked to put on some Tool, just to make sure he hadn't completely lost his edge.

He'd just fit his spare key in the second lock when he heard her on the other side, and he pocketed his keys while she threw open the door. "Where the hell have you been?" She snapped, grabbing him by the front of his shirt and yanking him inside.

He waited until she closed the door and started throwing locks again before asking, "Is everything okay?" A cursory glance of the room seemed to indicate everything was in its usual place, although the place smelled of toast and fried tomatoes, and his stomach grumbled hungrily. He hadn't even realized he was hungry until now.

She wheeled on him, magenta eyes wide and bright with anger. "You're asking me that?! You were gone all night, Logan! I mean, you tell me you're meeting with some demon friends about a problem, and then you're gone 'til ten in the fucking morning of the next day! You didn't call, you didn't anything -"

He groaned, rubbing his eyes. She was right, he had completely forgotten about her, and up close he could smell a tinge of her fear. It had been so long since anyone had worried about him, he'd forgotten it was possible. "God, Sri, I'm sor -"

"I was starting to wonder if you were lying in a gutter, half bled to death or something!" She continued, slightly agitated. "I mean … shit, Logan, I didn't even have any idea where I'd start looking for you …"

"I'm so sorry, hon," he replied honestly, reaching for her. She slapped his arm hard and angrily, but when he took her in his arms and pulled her to him, she didn't try and break away. He stroked her hair and rested his head against hers, glad to finally be with someone who was both friendly (generally) and competent. "I didn't mean to forget you, I didn't, it's just been a hell of a night."

"I guessed. You stink of blood." She nestled her head against the side of his neck, and he felt a tear against his skin. Her muscles felt tight, her whole body taut with tension, and he knew he couldn't keep doing this to her. It wasn't fair. "How badly were you hurt?"

Oh Christ, what to tell her. Certainly the truth wouldn't do. "Not bad. Most of this blood isn't mine." She couldn't smell the differences in people's blood; she wouldn't know he was lying.

But she was a woman, and one who knew him pretty well. She didn't need to know the differences in people's blood chemistry to know he was full of shit. "The purple and black blood I believe; the red, no."

"Some of it isn't, I swear." He kissed the top of her head, holding her tight, allowing himself to relax for the first time all night. He breathed in her warm scent, mainly because she smelled better than him, but also because he felt calmer with her, safer, like she was his own personal type of aromatherapy.

She held him tight, pressing herself against him in spite of his smell, and whispered into his neck, "Tell me it's over."

He groaned, and she tensed again, preparing to push him away but not doing it yet. "Sri, I'm so sorry, but -"

"But it's not."

"Yeah. I just came back to clean up and grab a bit to eat before headin' out again. But it's nothing' dangerous, it's just reconnaissance."

"I hate this," she murmured, and he felt a sudden cold twinge in his gut. Where had he heard that before? Oh, god, Mariko, right? He felt momentarily disoriented as he realized he had some tentative memory of her saying it in much the same tone, one with a great deal of resignation to it; she may have hated it, but she - they - knew that anger wasn't enough to change it. And he knew damn well what happened to the last woman who had cared about him that much. He closed his eyes and swallowed hard, trying to ride out the chilling numbness that shuddered through his body, an echo of searing emotional pain.

Could he lose Srina like he lost Mariko? And Yasha, and Elena, and Jean, and just about every woman he had ever cared about. Naomi was the lucky one, as she was still alive and still on this plane; she had no memory of him or her life previous to adolescence, but hell, at least she was still breathing. Even if he could resign himself to it, would it be fair to her? He was a curse, a tragedy always waiting to happen, and he knew he would damn her if he kept this up too long … if he hadn't damned her already.

He hated this. He hated all this death, all this pain, but the worst thing of all was how much he had probably caused, how much he had brought on himself.

She looked up at him, concern clouding her face, brows scrunching low over her eyes, "What is it?"

He shook his head, and attempted a smile, but it was so pathetic he stopped. "Nothing. I … I just noticed how much I stink. I smell a bit like a tire fire, don't I?"

She scowled, clearly not believing that was really what he meant to say. "You always do after you get into bloody fights with demons. How dangerous is this thing?"

He should have known he'd never get her off the track that easily. He considered lying, but that didn't seem fair, and he was sure she'd see through it immediately. "It's … pretty fucking bad. If we can't figure this out ASAP, we'll be looking at a catastrophic body count."

She sighed, shaking her head and resting it against his chest. "Bollocks. Do these people - things - have nothing better to do?"

"From what I can tell? No. This is what they do."

"Do you need my help?"

"No, not yet. I'll let you know." He wasn't going to risk her again. No, she wasn't feeble, she could take care of herself, but he was not going to put her in a position where she could get killed ever again. Maybe she wanted to go on the Mirror Lake thing, but he knew now he never should have let her come along. He couldn't have lost her; he wasn't prepared for that. But when it came to getting back at those fucking bastards, he could have a supremely selfish form of tunnel vision.

She shoved him away, but mildly, breaking out of his arms. "Go get in the shower. I don't think I can stand to smell you anymore."

He nodded, agreeing with her assessment, and glad he didn't have to keep lying to her. "Y'know, I could probably use some help gettin' my back," he suggested, giving her a cheesy grin.

He was expecting a molten death glare, and he got it. "Are you going, or do I hit you with the coffee table?"

"I'm goin'," he said, turning towards the back bathroom and shucking off his jacket, which wasn't nearly as bad as his shirt, which would probably have to be taken off with paint thinner. But shouldn't he be used to that by now?

He wondered if he could live with Srina hating his guts. He knew it would probably have to come to that, if he didn't want to bury her too.

8

He got out of her place later than he expected, mainly because Srina did eventually join him in the shower. She was still a little ticked off at him, but all passion was good as far as he was concerned. Well, as long as it didn't involve a burning hatred of him and bone saws.

Logan then wasted more time eating all the leftover Chinese and Indian food in her refrigerator, which wasn't really all that much, it was just scattered among a dozen containers. She had so many packets of soy and duck sauce, he could've built a fort out of them.

He felt better, although he'd hoped he would, food and sex being two major comfort mechanisms. It was also nice not to smell like a smoldering chemical factory, and to have all that itchy dried blood off his skin. He hoped this would all give him a slightly clearer perspective on what was going on here … but no, it didn't. It still didn't add up.

The two problems that needed immediate solving were: why would a spellcaster of such power need a somewhat limited demigod like Anzu to help him or her? And, come to think of it, what was the guarantee that Anzu wouldn't just wipe the spellcaster out? It didn't make sense, unless he or she - Gandalf - had some kind of deal with Anzu - they had a similar goal, a similar desire, a similar need. Which was ..? It couldn't be carnage; carnage could be achieved with human things: guns, bombs, disciples. There was a picture they weren't seeing here.

_(Do these people - things - have nothing better to do?)_

Of course this was the prelude to something else. But what did the giant pig have to do with the siphoning off of Kali's energy, the dismemberment of vampires, and the killing of kids?

As he sat on the roof of the warehouse, staking out Glenn's apartment, he suddenly wondered if the most obvious thing - the one thing they had all overlooked - was the answer.

There was no connection. None.

They were driving themselves crazy, smashing their heads against the wall, over-analyzing, looking to connect things that had no relation to each other. Just because Hashim thought there was a connection between the dismemberments and the child killings didn't mean there was - he was a mobster, yes? There could be a new player on his territory who had chosen to announce themselves this way, taking out the competition before they knew what hit them, before they could fight back. Certainly Anzu was killing the kids, but Logan found himself wondering if he fed on fear as well as time. Energy was energy, right? Could he feed off fear as well? Would scaring a chunk of the London populace be like dessert?

He really wanted to call Ruby and ask, but that would have required him climbing off the roof as he didn't have a cell phone, and the nearest pay phone he'd seen was one block over. Staking out Anzu's place seemed more important at the moment, so he decided to wait.

It was a surprisingly warm day for London, a scrim of thin gray clouds seemingly holding in the heat and humidity, and he was glad he decided to leave his coat at Srina's, and just go with the t-shirt and jeans. It just occurred to him that if he was going to get his gear covered in blood again, the less of it he had, the better.

There was something strangely serene sitting above the crowd, doing nothing, thinking nothing, just waiting. It was the Zen state he had discovered at the same time he discovered he was an experienced sniper; this was useful tunnel vision, the single minded focus on a single task. It was uncomplicated and lonely, and he knew that meant it was probably perfect for him. He was better as a solo act, not just out of personal preference, but necessity. People around him had a tendency to die, while he just had a tendency to get fucked up. The difference was, he recovered; they didn't. If he cared about anyone in his life, he would push them away and keep them away. He just had to accept the fact that he was a dangerous man, memories or no memories, and whether he honestly wanted to be or not. Choice had been factored out of his equation a long time ago.

After an hour and a half - give or take a few minutes - he finally got his first glimpse of Glenn.

Asha had described him, but Logan hadn't needed it. He knew it was Anzu just by the way he carried himself, like he ruled this entire puny place - it wasn't just no fear, it was the presumption of superiority, the loose strut of someone who knew he owned your ass and could kill you with a thought. And it was funny to see on a teenage boy. Oh, teen boys often carried themselves with arrogance, but they preferred to use it in a supposedly "tough" way, shoulders slouched, head down, body gathered in like a clenching fist. This was the open confidence of someone who had lived and killed for a very long time, for whom doubt and fear were foreign concepts. For all their conceit, boys were easy to undermine, their confidence and ego a very fragile thing; Anzu walked as if he was made of adamantium, inside and out.

As boys went, he was nothing special. Glenn was just under six feet tall, lean but muscular, with chestnut brown hair and a rugged face that probably would have been handsome in adulthood, his features strong and not blemished by acne (demigod possession probably helped a ton there). He wore a Manchester United shirt, a navy blue windbreaker, and selectively distressed jeans that were probably designer, along with ludicrously expensive sneakers. You'd think if his parents could afford such things he wouldn't live in such a shitty area, but the presumption was his parents bought them for him; maybe they didn't. If you were resourceful or unscrupulous, there was at least a dozen ways to get such things.

His eyes weren't glowing, but then again they couldn't, not if he wanted to be inconspicuous.

Logan used his claws to help him climb down the far side of the building, letting himself fall the last twelve feet or so, landing on his feet but not too heavily, which was important for the noise factor. It was unlikely that Anzu could hear him over the traffic and various heavy industrial noises coming from the dockside, or even care about it if he did hear about it, but when you were hunting someone, every detailed mattered.

He let him reach the top of the street before he walked out of the alley, only cutting over to his side of the street when he had turned the corner. Even among the smell of all the people, the garbage, exhaust, and the smell of effluents and sea salt, he could pick Anzu up, a neon streak on a pastel patchwork background. It was a scent like cordite and burning hair, rotting vomit and radioactive decay; it hit his olfactory senses like a knife, a feeling akin to biting down on tin foil. Even his scent radiated evil, or perhaps he should say corrosion; it was power perverted, turned inward and warped, imbuing psychic pollution into the air like a virus.

He let Anzu stay far ahead of him, as he would be able to follow his scent through a fish market on the hottest day of the year. There was no point in risking exposure when it was completely unnecessary. But he kept in general line of sight, in case he did a disappearing act, or, worse yet, attacked someone. Logan knew he'd probably have to blow his cover if Anzu did that, but what the fuck could he do? He didn't have enough residual Bob energy in him to fight a demigod successfully, certainly not one who could literally suck the life out of you without touching you. At least the Vilkacis had to touch you to kill you, which took longer.

…

The Vilkacis. How good would they be against Anzu? He wondered if there'd be a way to test that theory.

He walked for miles, and Logan was glad he had more stamina than an ordinary person, as Anzu walked pretty fast, and he never stopped, never took a break. Even at crosswalks, he paid no attentions to lights, as they were apparently beneath his notice, even when they honked at him like he was a cow lumbering across the road. Logan was sweating - again, he was glad he left his coat behind - but he wasn't tired. Yet.

Anzu's journey finally came to an end in the middle of the business district, which seemed like an odd place for a demigod. In many respects it looked just like any business district in any major metropolitan city, with skyscrapers of metal and glass, mirrors reflecting the mirrors of neighboring buildings like M.C. Escher had zoned the area, towers jammed in as tight as wheat stalks in a field. The sidewalks were equally crowded, even though it was neither lunch time or quitting time, and the traffic was a joke. For a moment, he could have thought he was in New York.

Anzu headed for a rare blank space on the block, a construction site with cordons and yellow tape on the outside, and huge sheets of opaque plastic sheeting covering up whatever was within. Anzu simply stepped over a cordon and went inside, sweeping back the plastic briefly, which swung shut behind him like a curtain. Logan waited two minutes before approaching it cautiously, aware that it might be difficult if not impossible for him to see what the fuck was being hidden in there without giving himself up.

He was within a few feet of the cordon when he smelled the residue of an explosion, old but powerful. He also smelled the more recent scent of blood and something herbal, cloying and thick, with a hint of smoke. The way the wind was blowing, the sheets of plastic, milky as a cataract filmed eye, undulated, opening gaps. Logan peeked through one, trusting that his hearing and sense of smell would have alerted him if someone was close by behind the curtains.

He caught sight of what looked like an altar in the middle of a small pit, the centerpiece of which was a severed Human head with candles burning in its empty eye sockets, its skin so desiccated it looked as if it was made of leather. What appeared to be unfurled intestines ringed the edges of the pit, and arcane symbols were drawn in blood and tar in the dirt, and on a partial wall on the far side of the site. There was some Latin scrawled there as well, which he actually could read.

'_Here lies the Watchers,' it read. 'May they burn in hell. May their souls belong to me.'_

Watchers? Wait a second - their headquarters were blown up. Was this it? Was this the place?

Oh shit, the Watchers. Was that the connection they had missed? Asha was a child of Watchers; a Watchers book caused this mess. Was that the key?

Holy shit - did Ruby already know that and not tell them? He had assumed she was one of the "good guys" - what if she_ wasn't_?

He sensed someone behind him just before a voice asked, "See something you like?"


	9. Part 9

How to play this. People continued to crowd the sidewalks, walking by them, so if he elbowed this guy in the face, he'd probably send him straight into the path of a civilian. He couldn't risk an open assault on the street, and he didn't think one of Anzu's people could either. (Why would Anzu have people? Well, Gandalf might.)

So rather than take the guy out with a single backwards thrust of his elbow, he turned slowly, already knowing by smell he was just dealing with a Human.

The guy standing behind him was built like a vending machine, stocky and broad across the chest and shoulders, maybe an inch or two smaller than him but clearly formidable, a solid guy who would be hard to knock down in a fight. Well, not for him, but for others who didn't have the twin advantages of a metal skeleton and innate viciousness.

He had a broad, doughy face, the skin so pockmarked with acne scars it could have been pumice rather than flesh, his coffee colored eyes like thumbprints in dough. His thinning hair was an odd color, a very dirty blond that became almost translucent at the ends, making it look like his hair was turning invisible as opposed to falling out. On the plain dark blue canvas jacket he wore was a little tag identifying him as some type of security guard, most like a private contractor. "Pardon" Logan replied, casting surreptitious glances around for his back up. There were none in line of sight.

The man tried on a crooked grin, revealing a snaggletooth in the front bottom row of his teeth. He looked like a Central Casting East End street tough. "I have to ask you to move along, sir. There's been some theft and vandalism in the area, and - "

"That's what I'm investigating," he lied, deciding to see if he could bluff any information out of this guy. Either he was just a Human hired by one of the bad guys or local businesses, and knew nothing of what was going on - a patsy - or he did know, and was a Human henchman being very careful about identifying himself to others. There was really only one way to find out.

That did seem to surprise him, his forced grin faltering. "What?"

Logan made a show of glancing around suspiciously, as if to make sure no one was listening, and then said, in a low whisper, "My name's Scott Summers, I'm a private investigator hired by Helos International to look into some unusual occurrences around the area. Who are you working for?"

The man seemed flummoxed, genuinely surprised, and didn't know how to answer at first. "Ah, uh, I work for Landown Security. We were contracted by the Apex Group to protect these three buildings." He indicated the skyscrapers beside the site, and the site itself. Logan wanted to point out there was no building on the site, but it would've seemed cruel.

Logan jerked his head towards the shadow of the nearest skyscraper, and walked over there without looking back at him. Both curious and nervous, the rent-a-cop followed. Bob had been right - believing was ninety eight percent of everything. And if you believed the bullshit you were spewing out, others were likely to as well. As soon as the man joined him, he said, still in a hushed and intense voice, "Look, I've only been on the job three days, and a lot of this shit doesn't make any sense. If you have any info you can share that might help me, I would appreciate it."

The man looked startled and wary by turns. "Well ... what do you mean?"

Logan shrugged expansively. "Anything that would give me an insight into the problem. Do we have main suspects? Are we looking for teenagers or what?"

The man's shoulders relaxed slightly, some of the tension draining away. "Oh, naw, I wouldn't think so. Teenagers would stick out around 'ere. Not a lot of kids in these parts."

And yet a teenager had just been on the street and walked into the construction site. Either he was lying blatantly, or had genuinely missed Anzu, through general incompetence or Anzu simply not wanting to be seen. He was a demigod, he couldn't put it past him. Of course he was seen earlier by him and several other people on the street, but that didn't mean anything; he may have simply saved it for the security around here. "Yeah, okay, but who would be doing it, then? I can't imagine chartered accountants doing this on their lunch break."

That made the man smirk, amused at the thought, and he shook his head again, relaxing even more. He was dealing with a clueless fellow security professional, and he felt superior. People usually jumped at the chance to feel superior. "We're thinkin' disgruntled ex-employees, people who know their way around and know what the schedule is. They seem to hit late at night, and we haven't even been able to catch 'em on video."

Logan nodded, putting on a serious face, and jerked his head in the direction of a steel and glass skyscraper across the street. "Did ya know they were hit by a security breach last week?"

His eyes widened as he looked at the building sharply. "No. What happened?"

"Someone got inside and accessed the computer system. They're still not sure if the firewall was breached or not, but they think that's what these people are after."

The man looked at him guilelessly, clearly not comprehending. "What? Computer access?"

"Corporate files. It's espionage, man, that's where the big bucks are."

He "hmmed" and nodded as if that was self-evident, scratching his head as he considered how to connect what was going on outside with corporate espionage - if, in fact, there was anything actually going on out here. He still wasn't sure if this guy was an innocent patsy, or a deliberate participant. Either he was honestly vacant, or he had an expert poker face. Logan supposed he would find out one way or another later. "Look, gotta piss off - meeting with the big wigs - but I'll see you later, okay?"

The man looked at him with interest, one eyebrow raised, but he nodded in agreement. "Who'd you say you worked for again?"

"Helos International," he made a very vague gesture down the street as he started walking away. "Catch ya later, bub." He then turned around and walked away, getting lost in the crowd.

His first thought was to find a pay phone - which were becoming less and less available in the age of cell phones - but the more he thought about it, the more he realized he had to confront Ruby about this in person; he didn't want to warn her. How good a spellcaster was she? He assumed she had some skills in that department, since that seemed to come along with being a Watcher, but he assumed it varied from person to person. For instance, Wesley relied often on spells, and Logan knew he'd cast quite a few good ones - he'd helped him when he got a little brain rattled, right? He suddenly remembered standing on the balcony of one of the torn up rooms in Angel's old hotel, smoking a cigar and looking down on the street below, where people drove by oblivious to all the grotesqueries around them. And didn't he, in some small way, envy them? Envy their ability to think they lived in a world that was relatively sane and orderly, where shadowy government agencies didn't brainwash or design people into becoming living weapons of mass destruction, and where vampires and demons were relegated to the horror section of the local bookstore. Where no one thought to look behind the tarps covering a construction site, because there's no way there'd be something as sinister as a dismembered body in a place as staid and ordinary as this.

He stopped as an almost crippling wave of sorrow overwhelmed him. They were all gone; every single one of them. Wesley, Cordelia, Angel, Gunn, probably even that annoying fuckhead Spike - they were all dead, or at least never coming back here, barring an act of one god or another. And did anyone even know? Did anyone even care? Angel alone had saved the world a few times, enough so that he seemed blasé about it ("Apocalypse of the week" he'd once commented to him), but did anyone know outside the small, dark sphere in which they lived?

No one knew, and no one cared. The world went on, regardless of the people who had given their lives trying to protect the damn stupid thing, which honestly wasn't worth it anyways. What was he doing here? Why? Was this some stupid ass form of atonement? Because he wasn't there when they needed him, and because he could only bury one of them, he was now doing a sweep up job? Cleaning the floor after the bar fight is over?

He couldn't think about this now, mainly because sorrow was mutating into the more familiar emotions of self-pity and rage, and it would get to the point where he would have to cry or hit something, and he didn't want to do either, mainly because it was unlikely he could do either anonymously on a busy London street.

He started walking, taking short cuts he knew and ones he simply guessed at, trying to concentrate on the problem at hand. Could Ruby actually be in on this? Was she a potential threat? Or did she simply miss this connection as well? Was he reading a threat where there was none? He was a paranoid bastard, there was little denying that.

He knew he should get a cab and get over to Ruby's ASAP, but he was tempted quite sorely to get a beer. Just one pint; it wouldn't take him long to drink it. They could call him a cab while he waited. If she was the big bad, another five minutes either way wasn't going to make a difference, and he needed to get this clot out of his throat.

He was in a more depressed area by the looks and smells of things, but there was a promising looking pub on the corner, dark and dank, with a single window that looked like it hadn't been washed in years, But as he was jaywalking across the street to get to it, he heard slurs and cursing, hostility that carried easily over the traffic noise.

For a change, it wasn't aimed at him, but was down the street parallel to the pub, and he saw a group of honest to Hitler skinheads intimidating a mixed race couple that had picked the wrong street to walk down. There were six of them, young men ranging from sixteen to twenty five, all with identical shaved heads and general bland fashion sense, some making a random stab at individuality with a tattoo on their neck or a black leather jacket. It was terrible, but Logan felt something lighten in his heart upon seeing those stupid motherfuckers; he needed to punch something.

He headed down the street, and said, loudly, "I have an Indian girlfriend. Would you like to take a crack at me?"

They all looked at him, the skinheads and the alarmed couple. Most of the boys were wearing football shirts, just like Glenn/Anzu was, making him wonder if there was a tie between fascism and sports that no one had studied yet. (But hockey was immune; or at least it was in his case.) Looking at the skinhead's dark, hard eyed and empty stares - they all looked oddly similar, and devoid of everything but belligerence, which was something he could work - he decided to add more fuel to the fire. "Oh, and my wife was Japanese, and my best friend's blacker than Wesley Snipes. So what you got for me, boys?" He almost felt like adding, '_And it seems I fought you're your idols in World War Two'_, but that would just raise more questions he had no intention of answering.

The leader, perhaps the oldest skinhead, with a swastika tattooed in black ink on the right snide of his neck, sneered at him, lip curling up like a rabid dog just shown a injured cat. "Piss off, wanker."

Logan put his hand to his chest as if hurt by his words, and was close enough to them that they broke off from the couple and started to take a formation stance, ready to swarm him. "That's it? God, you guys are not only pussies, but you have no originality whatsoever. But what should I expect from a bunch of limp dicked Nazi wannabes?"

Now the last few surrounding the couple - a black man and a white woman - broke off and came towards him, and Logan shot the couple a look that clearly said "_Go_". Although there was some hesitancy to leave him alone so outnumbered, they did.

The leader approached him, chest puffed up like he thought he was a hard and scary man. He probably thought he was, but Logan thought he looked pathetic; he could only manage to be scary with a group. "Are you thick? Gotta death wish, old man?"

Logan couldn't help but smirk at that. "You don't know the half of it."

His eyes, dark piss holes in snow, seemed to contract even further into his puffy face. "You a poofter or somethin'? You get off on gettin' beat down, is that it?"

Logan knew he was just adding fuel to the fire, but he couldn't help but chuckle. "Like you could beat me down. I could wait for you to call all your knuckle dragging friends, you could fill the town square, and you still wouldn't beat my ass down, you stupid fuckhead. You are outmatched. Move on, and maybe I won't pound you flat."

The skinheads started to close ranks around him. He could see them out of the corners of his eye, sensed one behind him waiting to sucker punch. It was all rather sad; he bet they couldn't actually fight for shit. The leader scoffed derisively. "Outmatched? What, can't you count?"

"What an ugly cunt," one of his minions on the right said. "No wonder no self-respecting white woman would fuck 'im."

"Oh, I don't know about that. Does your mother count?" It was way too easy a shot and he knew it, but it was too good to miss.

That did it. The guy on the right threw a punch, which Logan saw coming before he actually threw it, he telegraphed it that badly. He caught his fist easily and twisted, snapping his arm like twig, the snap of bone as loud as a firecracker. The guy sucked in a hard breath, eyes going wide, all the blood draining from his face as he staggered back, his arm hanging at a really painful looking angle. But at least it was a clean break.

Skinheads were generally like hyenas, meaning one didn't attack, all of them did, so he caught a kick coming in on his left, grabbing the boy's boot before it could make contact and yanked up, sending him crashing back first to the pavement, where his bald head bounced like a basketball. He kicked the leader in the leg before he could make his move, a sharp shot to the tibia that made his leg buckle and drove him down to one knee. He could have given him a flat footed shot that would have broken his leg clean, but that would have ended the fight too soon, and he had many issues to work out.

Logan then spun quickly, arm extended, and knocked away the arm of the guy who was trying to sucker punch him from behind, and planted a firm kick in his midsection that sent him not only sprawling back on his ass, but also made him roll over and puke his guts up on the sidewalk. That would teach him to get into a fight on a full stomach.

There were two other skinheads, though, and one chose - very unwisely - to punch him in the back of the head. Normally that was a stupid move, as bone on bone impact was a good way to break your own knuckles, but this was bone on adamantium impact, which was even stupider. Although he had to admit the hit did hurt a bit - okay, not really, but even in his own mind he had to give the guy something for the effort - it was nothing compared to the sharp crack of his knuckles, which didn't so much earn a scream than a high pitched, breathless squeak, suggesting he hurt so much he could barely muster the energy to breathe. He got the second one coming in from the right, landing a solid punch that caught him just under the jaw and sent him flying backwards into the wall of a chemist's shop. He checked the punch, held back, as there was no need to shatter his jaw … unless, of course, he came back for seconds. He took the guy with the broken knuckles all the way down with a leg sweep, and as he fell, he automatically held out a hand to break his fall. From the way he screamed, it was his bad hand. Pity.

"Oh, that is it," the leader snarled, getting back up to his feet, reaching into his jacket. The guy with the broken arm, the one with the broken knuckles, the one who hit his head on the street (from the groaning, he was still conscious, which meant he must have had a thick head, but he was still clearly bleeding), and the one retching behind him were all out of the fight; meaning the mini-Hitler and the guy slumped against the wall were the only two left. Oddly, he found it disappointing; he let them have it too hard, too fast. Why couldn't there have been eight of them? Sixteen? Was twenty too much to ask for?

The leader pulled out a switchblade, flicking out its four and a half inch blade, and Logan couldn't help but laugh. "You're gonna make me say it, aren't you?"

The boy looked at him, blind hate mixing with confusion, and he scowled in general belligerence. "What?"

Logan couldn't help but grin like an idiot, feeling foolish but still unable to resist. "You call that a knife?" He held up his right fist and sprung his claws. "_These_ are knives."

The leader jumped back, eyes widening in shock, and the guy against the wall exclaimed, "Fuck!"

The leader looked between his claws and his face in rapid alarm, although disgust bloomed on his ugly face, hatred burning bright in his eyes. "I shoulda known, you're one'a them, gene trash." He spit at his feet, but missed by about six inches.

Logan could only smile. "You call me the trash? That's interesting. Tell me, who just got their asses kicked?"

The leader was not interested in having that conversation. He 'd found a new person to hate. "Yer all gonna die, trash. Humans won't stand for filth like you. You and your kind are an endangered species."

"Let's assume you're an idiot. Safe bet. Evolution moves forward, not backwards; get used to us, 'cause we're here to stay. As are all the minorities you hate so much … who are, in fact, the majority about now. Kind of a pisser for you, huh?" He retracted his claws, and lowered his hand to the side. " And hey, there are uglier things in this world than you, believe it or not, and us Humans oughta stick together … if you are indeed Human anymore. Wanna take your best shot with the knife, bub? I'll give you a freebie."

He hesitated, clearly not trusting him. Logan told him, "C'mon, do your worst. You pussy, gobshite?"

His scowl deepened, eyes nearly disappearing beneath his brows, and finally, in pure hate, he threw the knife. Logan popped his claws again and slashed it into pieces in midair, even though he'd thrown the knife very unprofessionally, and there was no way in hell it ever would have hit. Logan gave him a hard grin, one that didn't come anywhere near his eyes. "Oh, come on, I'm not _that _nice." He popped his second set of claws, and advanced towards him with deliberate menace.

The leader and his friend with the swollen jaw took off, running down a near by alley, and Logan just watched them go, chuckling under his breath. It was evil and it was wrong, it probably made him no better than the skinheads, but damn it if he didn't feel much better. The beer could wait.

He retracted his claws and heard scattered applause. He looked behind him, and saw a small group - mostly men - had gathered outside the pub, some still holding their pints. He suddenly felt embarrassed, like a sideshow attraction, but he nodded and waved off the applause as he stepped over the fallen skinheads. "Uh, someone might want to dial nine-nine-nine for them or somethin'," he suggested.

The crowd backed off as he approached, most filtering back into the pub now that the show was over, but a big Irish guy who was still watching the puking skinhead writhe on the ground said, "For them? Fuck 'em, let 'em rot. Stupid buggers."

Well, at least at the end of the day, he could say he had a few fans.

9

He had considered just barging in, but the fact that Ruby was always paranoid enough to lock the door but the kibosh on that. He could kick the door down, but that would take away any element of surprise, and he had no idea what level of spellcaster she was. If she was really good, he'd be a goner before the door hit the floor.

So he knocked on the door, and waited for her to come open it, which she did, greeting him with a hard look and a scowl. "If you're going to be a fuckwit, you can't come in."

He held up his hands in a gesture of supplication, and said, "I'll keep my smart ass comments to myself."

Her look was suspicious, lips thinning to a grim line. "For your sake, you'd better." She opened the door wider and walked away, so he followed with a cursory look around her home. The incense smell was more intense than earlier, and Asha was sprawled out on the clean couch, looking dead, but judging from the regular rise and fall of her chest, she was just asleep. A green blanket now covered the bloody couch.

He followed Ruby to her small kitchen, which smelled strongly of tea, bergamot, and vanilla. He saw a cup of tea sitting on the sideboard, as well as a saucer of cookies, mostly the shortbread kind. He stole one of the cookies, and pointed at the cup of tea. "You drinkin' this?"

Her glance seemed sharper than necessary. "Help yourself. You're probably going to anyways."

"I'd prefer a beer."

"And I'd prefer a reasonable person, but we can't always get what we want, can we?"

He snickered as he took a gulp of tea (Formosa oolong, a pleasantly delicate tasting tea), and admired Ruby's general chutzpah. Oh sure, he'd probably be sick to death of her in two day's time, but her bluntness was kind of refreshing. She was looking at two different books, both of which were open on her kitchen table, and occasionally sipping a diet Coke. "Any luck?" he wondered, mainly because he was curious what she would say.

She made a negative noise, flipping through a few pages. "I scryed for a power center, but I couldn't find it. Anzu and his sorcerer mate have locked things down tight. What about you? Did you tail Glenn, or simply hang out in a pub and pretend to be useful?"

"I tailed Glenn, and I know where something's happen, if not exactly what."

She glanced at him sidelong, as if he wasn't quite worth a full look. "Oh? Where?"

"The business district."

She finally looked at him, but with a menacing glare that probably would have made the skinheads piss their pants. "I thought you were done with the bullshit."

"It's not bullshit. I tailed him to a construction site in the business district, where there's a Human head and some scattered entrails laid out in a ritualistic manner behind some weatherproof tarps."

She straightened up, and finally seemed to be taking him seriously. "On a construction site? Why the hell would they pick there? Seems rather conspicuous, doesn't it?"

"Yeah, that occurred to me, but this isn't just any site; it's special."

If she knew what he was getting at, he saw no sign of it yet. "How?"

"It's the old Watcher's building, you know, your former HQ. The place that blew up."

Understanding dawned on her face with all the signs of shock. It unfurled in her eyes, made her jaw slack, and she turned back to her books with a look of horror. "Oh god, why didn't I think of that?" She started flipping through the pages violently, threatening to tear onion skin thin paper. Either she was an excellent actress, or she really hadn't any idea.

"So what are we looking at here, a revenge scenario? Who hates the Watchers that much?"

She scoffed, shaking her head, but never looking up from her books. "Ninety nine point nine percent of the demon population, and perhaps a handful of gods."

"Well, I think we can safely eliminate the gods here, can't we? They wouldn't need rituals; they'd just crush us."

"Yes, fine, but the playing field is still wide open."

It was, there was no getting around that. Except …"Okay, so what do we know? They hate Watchers, they hate vampires, they ain't very fond of Kali either, and they're happy to get into bed with Anzu. Does that narrow the list down at all?"

She shrugged and shook her head. "Most demons think of vampires as parasites, something beneath them because they need a host body to survive, so they are the among the most disliked demons around. As far as Anzu goes, I can't think of anyone quite that stupid, or power hungry."

"How good a spellcaster are you?"

She gave him a hard glance, but sighed, as if about to confess to a major crime. "I'm rusty. I was on leave from the Watchers when the place went up, more devoted to my duties with MI-5. After becoming a werewolf, I became very disenchanted with Watching. Isn't that hard to believe?"

"Look, you know as well as I do that Meldane isn't enough. We need someone with good magic skills, and we need them tonight."

She straightened up, her left hand clenching into a fist at her side. "You want to hit them tonight? Even though we still have no idea who we're dealing with?"

"If you're right, we won't have any idea who we're dealing with until we do hit them."

"So we go and get slaughtered?"

"Not with enough magic behind us, and not with an army. You have to admit they'll never expect an attack."

"Anzu. Forgot about him? He can kill us all before we get close."

He scratched his neck, and figured that Ruby probably was a good guy, just a foul tempered one. "And what if I tell the Vilkacis he's been draining Kali's energy? What then?"

Her look was surprised, but also, strangely enough, almost admiring. "Turn the Vilkacis on Anzu? Dear lord, you are ruthless, aren't you?"

"Will they survive?"

"Does it matter?" She rubbed her forehead as she considered it. "Demigod on demigod. Yes, they have a much better shot of fighting him than anything mortal."

"Great, he's taken care of for the moment. Do you know any former Watchers or witches or anything that you can call in to help us?"

She bit her lower lip and turned away, glancing down at her books but staring straight through them. Her shoulders sank as if in shame, and finally she said, "I do know someone. He's retired to the Cotswolds, but he's got better magic skills than I do, and I'm pretty sure he's connected to a coven of witches, which should be extremely useful."

"Will he come?"

"The city's in danger. He'll come. But what about this so called army?"

"Don't worry, that's where I come in," he told her, hoping he could indeed pull this together. He damn well better, or they were all going to be sorry. Well, if they lived long enough.

* * *

It turned out the vampire who sounded like Michael Caine was a six foot four black man named Euan, who had shoulder length dreadlocks and "Love" tattooed on the knuckles of his left hand. Logan had to ask where the "hate" was, which earned him a funny look. "I don't 'ate anybody," he claimed, finishing off a cheese sandwich he'd picked up at the pub where they'd met before sunset. "That's negative energy, and that'll kill ya, sure as shit."

"You're a vampire."

"So? Doesn't mean I 'ate people. Kill 'em, sure, but that's a survival thing."

He also had an iPod tucked under his long black leather jacket, and from what Logan could hear bleeding from the tiny earbuds, he was listening to Parliament Funkadelic. While Logan approved - at least he had good taste in tunes - that wasn't exactly appropriate "going into battle" music, was it? Unless they planned to dance their way there.

Euan was just among the first guard of vampires, the one in charge of the group going with him as soon as the sun was safely down. Hashim would be leading the second guard, the ones who would appear out of nowhere like a nightmare … well, if everything went according to plan. And really, there wasn't much of a plan, was there? The key was to go in hard and hot, and simply overwhelm them, throw them off their strategy in a crippling way. Hashim thought it sounded suicidal, but he admired the simple balls to do something like that, so he agreed to take part. He also had to go get the Vilkacis, which was much harder than it had initially seemed, and took up most of the day. Finally he found them, sharing a floor of suites at the Savoy Hotel (seriously - they were demigods with expensive tastes), and although they were reluctant to assume Humanoid forms and talk to him again, he fed them the bullshit story about Anzu, in Human form, draining Kali's energy for himself. They were so agitated they had a hard time keeping a coherent form, their skin looked like it was bubbling, sliding off their bones, and they were so furious they wanted to go off and kill him now. He was able to talk them into waiting, and just barely, so he wasn't sure if they'd go in early or not. But even if they did, they'd come to the rendezvous point, simply because the address he gave him was actually an empty reservoir, and there was nothing and no one there. If they really wanted Anzu, they had to join him.

Among the group of vampires who met them at Hyde Park (the rendezvous point) after sunset was a handful of serpent-esque Ressiks, green and copper alike, standing off by themselves and looking surly. According to Euan, they owed the boss "a favor", and he was cashing it in. Although he didn't trust that particular breed as a rule, at least they were vicious motherfuckers, and that was helpful right now.

Meldane also showed, and while he tried to convince him he wasn't necessary, he didn't buy it, and seemed miffed. "I am so a good spell caster," he protested. "I saved your hairy ass from the Vilkacis the other night, didn't I? I'm good." But after he started getting pointed looks from Hashim's people, he shut up and stood in the back, smoking a Galois and looking cranky.

Ruby showed up before the Vilkacis, with a guest in tow. Logan was shocked to recognize her guest, the tweedy British man from Wesley's funeral, the one who turned suicide bomber on him in that alternate world: Giles. Giles seemed surprised to see him too, straightening his wire rimmed glasses more out of affectation than necessity. "You're …" he began hesitantly, clearly trying to remember his name. " I'm sorry, I forgot. We met at Wesley's funeral."

He nodded. "Logan."

"Rupert Giles," he said, in case he didn't remember his name. "I had no idea you were the, uh …"

Just by the way he stopped short, as if appalled by what he might say, Logan knew it was bad. He glared at Ruby. "What did you call me?"

She shrugged, as if it didn't matter, but she was smiling ever so slightly, enjoying this. "Weirdo."

"Ruby was never known for her tact," Giles offered.

Really? He never would have guessed.


	10. Part 10

"Now that we're done with the arse sniffing," a copper Ressik snarled, flicking his cigarette butt to the jogging path. "Can we get on with it?"

Ruby scowled at them. "What the hell are they doing here?"

"They owe Hashim a favor," Logan offered with a shrug.

Giles looked towards him sharply. "Hashim? As in 'Hashim the Hun'?"

Logan didn't know how to answer that. " The Hun?"

"One and the same," Ruby agreed. "He's pretty much in charge of the entire London demon mob. Ruthless bastard."

"Oi, watch it," Euan interjected.

Giles gave him a deadly serious look, eyes steely behind plastic lenses. "How exactly do you know him?"

"Just through Lady Blood." Even as he said it, he knew it was the absolute wrong thing to say.

His eyes widened, but just briefly, his British reserve version of a poker face slamming right back down after a single moment. "Lady Blood? This just gets better and better."

He shook his head, and wondered how much he could actually say in front of Hashim's men. This would be tricky. "Uh … look, it's not as bad as it sounds. I'm not some kinda vampire groupie, it's just … complicated."

"Who gives a fuck?" Ruby interrupted, cutting to the chase. Although Giles grimaced sourly, Logan was relived that her impatience got him off the hook. "Look, Rupert, we have to get this sodding ritual under way, before the moon is fully risen."

Giles sighed heavily, and she held out a black satchel that he took without bothering to look , walking over to a near by bench. "Whoa, wait," Meldane said, glancing between them nervously. "Ritual? What ritual?"

Ruby pulled out a cigarette pack of her own, but crushed it in annoyance and shoved it in her coat pocket, her sharp movements causing her amulet to glint in the dim light. "Do you really think any of us could stand a chance against this wizard, whoever the fuck he or she is, not to mention Anzu? We needed to even the odds."

"Protection spell?"

She snorted derisively and shook her head. "Like that alone would be enough? We're doing the conventus spiritus spell."

There were probably a couple ways that could be translated, but his mind interpreted it as "assembly of spirits", which sounded kind of weird, but not earth shaking. Still, the reactions of everyone else seemed to indicate otherwise. Meldane looked utterly gob smacked, there were hostile rumblings from the vampires, and the copper Ressik exclaimed angrily, "No fucking way! We didn't agree to that!"

Ruby was prepared for that, or least was always steely in the face of opposition. "Then get the fuck out of here, you bleeding coward. I didn't ask you to be here in the first place."

The Ressik's spine stiffened, and the scales on his neck and face flared slightly, making him look that much wider. "What did you just call me, cow?"

"Hey, everybody, shut the fuck up," Logan snapped, giving the Ressik a hard and challenging stare. As soon as he was confident it understood he'd kick his ass if he continued, he looked to Ruby. "What is this thing exactly, this 'union of spirits'?"

She raised an eyebrow imperiously. "You speak Latin? Aren't we 'Mister Smarter Than We Look'?"

"Save the insults for later. What's up with this?"

"It's a type of binding spell," Giles said. He had been calmly pulling things out of the bag and putting them on the bench, pretty much ignoring everyone. He'd laid out several stinky things, herbs and whatever in small plastic bags, but what Logan noticed was the big ass knife with the ornate etching on the seven inch silver blade. "Since alone we're no match for whoever is doing this, this ritual will combine all our energies into a single reservoir that we can all share. An attack on one of us is an attack on all; it won't be as easy."

"But does that mean that if one of us gets taken down, we all suffer for it?"

"No. Energy isn't destroyed."

"We get sucked into the fucking collective," the Ressik growled. "When the spell is done, you guys get the energy, or it dissipates or some such shit, whatever, but I don't like the idea of giving up Ul'vaHal for you freaks."

He was sure the Ressik had said an actual word, but it sounded a bit like he was hocking a loogie. "Uvula?"

"Ul'vaHal," Giles replied with a bored sigh. "The Ressik concept of reincarnation."

He had no idea they believed in anything, not to even mention reincarnation. "You guys Buddhist or Hindu?" he wondered. The Ressiks glared at him with their huge, saucer sized yellow eyes, growling ever so slightly. Okay, so not big on mammal religions.

"We need to select the anchors," Ruby interjected impatiently, crossing her arms over her chest. Her hostile glance seemed to encompass them all, as if they were all making her late for a dinner date.

"I'll be mystic," Giles said, tucking the presumably empty bag beneath the bench. "We'll need to select a physical."

"Oh no," Ruby instantly responded. "No offense, Rupert, but I'm younger, and lest you forget, werewolf? Even in my Human form, I can take a lot more than you can."

Giles shook his head and turned to face her, looking surprisingly weary. "But I can actually use the energy, Ruby; you yourself admitted that you don't have the level of spellcasting skills to do it. I'll be fine. I've spent half my life fighting nasty things, and I'm not dead yet."

"Uh, what the fuck are you guys going on about?" he wondered, wandering over towards them so they'd be unable to ignore him. If they still insisted upon doing so, he figured he could start invading their personal space.

Ruby's gaze cut like a knife, as always, but Giles, perhaps because he was tired, was kinder. "The spell uses people within the group as 'anchors' to help contain the energy and leave it controllable, otherwise it would overwhelm everyone and be useless. A mystical anchor helps control it on the higher planes, and can use it on that level. A physical would bind it to the earth plane in a similar manner."

"Ah." He nodded like he got it, but he really didn't; he wasn't sure it mattered though. "So what does a physical anchor have to do?"

Giles shrugged. "Stay alive is the glib answer. But -"

"Fine, call me an anchor. I'm heavy anyways."

Ruby wandered away to monitor a potential fight, as some of the vampires were giving the Ressiks shit, and if someone didn't intervene, the Ressiks were likely to start dismembering them. Not that Ruby or any of the rest of them cared, but they still might need them for the fight. There was never enough cannon fodder. Giles gave him a look that could only be described as deadpan, and asked, "What is your mutation exactly? I remember you said it was physical. Are you stronger than average?"

"Kinda, yeah, but mainly I just heal fast."

"Heal fast? How so?"

"Well, I know it doesn't sound that impressive, but if you don't kill me instantly, odds are you won't get a second chance. I've been shot, stabbed, bled out, drowned, electrocuted, defenestrated, poisoned, run over, gassed, dropped from a helicopter, blown up -"

There was no poker face now. He looked ever so slightly horrified, eyes wide and mouth gaping, making the fine lines on his face stand out in relief. Why did he always do that to people? "You're serious?"

"Sadly, yeah. I also, umm, have claws, if that matters at all."

"Claws?"

He held up his fist and demonstrated, popping a set of claws for him. Like most people, he jumped and took a step back as the blades sprung out from his hand, but he looked at them with open and blatant curiosity, reaching out to touch one before he paused, aware he hadn't been given permission to do so. "They're metal?"

"My whole skeleton's laced with it. Don't ask, it's a long story, but I wasn't born that way."

His gaze was intensely quizzical, but like he told him, he didn't ask. "Can I ask what type of metal it is?"

"Adamantium. It can cut through everything."

He nodded, seemingly impressed, and said, "Yes, I think you'd make an excellent anchor."

He wasn't surprised. He'd always felt a bit like an anchor.

Ruby's terse nature put an end to the Ressiks concerns, mainly by pointing out they didn't have to worry about Ul'vaHal if they didn't die, so there was no way they could leave unless they wanted to look like complete fucking cowards. It didn't endear Ruby to the Ressiks, but Ruby traditionally didn't endear herself to anything, and the Ressiks didn't like mammals unless they were appetizers.

As soon as the in fighting was lowered to a simmer, Giles and Ruby started on the spell. It seemed to involve many chanted words in Latin and words in a language he didn't recognize at all, and they laid out patterns in a mixture of stinky herbs on the ground. Giles motioned him over as he smeared some antiseptic smelling salve on his hands. He offered him a dollop of some of the eucalyptus and alum reeking goop, but he shook his head. "What's that? Part of the ritual?"

"No, it just numbs your hand."

He noticed now that Ruby had the wicked looking knife in her hand, and was coming right towards them. Oh boy, this was going to hurt, wasn't it? "I don't need it. Pain will get my adrenaline goin', and I need it for the fight."

That made him raise an eyebrow. "Now isn't the time for machismo."

"It isn't. Believe me, I've had much worse." He thought; he hoped. He still had no idea what Ruby was going to do with that knife, but part of him thought that ignorance was indeed bliss.

"All right. Give me your hand."

That made Logan smirk, in spite of himself. "Ain't cha gonna buy me dinner first?"

How many times in his life had he seen the exact same withering look that he was now getting from Giles? Was he really that much of an ass, or did people just have no sense of humor at all?

Still, he did as he was eventually told, and held out his right hand palm up. Giles covered it with his own left hand, palm down, and Ruby said something in that guttural, incomprehensible language before plunging the knife straight through their hands. In spite of the numbing goop, Giles sucked in a hard breath, and even Logan gritted his teeth, even though he had indeed had worse. Still, it fucking hurt.

Ruby said a couple more words, leaving the dagger in their hands, and collected the blood that dribbled off the blade in a tiny cup that included even more stinking herbs and what smelled like charred bones. After a couple more syllables and several seconds, Ruby withdrew the cup and yanked the dagger out. Holy fuck, that hurt too.

Giles instantly pulled away and wedged his hand beneath his arm, clearly in pain but trying very hard not to react to it. His hand hurt, but it was soon lost in a flush of heat as the healing began. He shook it a bit, even though that never did any good. Ruby approached them, using a little twig of witch hazel to stir the blood mixture together, and said, "Pucker up." He didn't, and she used the end of the twig to smear a bit of it on his forehead, which he imagined she meant to do in the first place. She made a show of scrutinizing him before saying, "A little eyeliner, and you might pass for Human."

He gave her the finger, as that seemed the most concise response, but he used the wrong hand, his right, which he only realized after she stared at it. The wound was mostly closed up, he could feel the edges of his skin knitting themselves together, an unconformable sensation like a million insects crawling beneath skin, burrowing into his muscles and sliding into his bloodstream. To his horror, they were all staring at his hand, crowding around to see what the hell was going on, and he quickly withdrew his hand and hid it behind his back. Too late, it seemed. "Now tha's just creepy," vampire Scott said from the peanut gallery.

How bad did you have to be for a fucking vampire to call you creepy?

Giles got a smear on his forehead too, and wrapped a scarf around his hand to staunch the bleeding, a scarf oddly enough contributed by a pretty young vampire who called herself Adrenochrome, or Drena for short. She looked like she just dropped out of the Matrix auditions, clad in a tight black vinyl jumpsuit and improbable knee high black leather boots with about a hundred decorative buckles on them, short hair slicked back and dyed a rather violent shade of electric blue, and she was wearing black wraparound sunglasses at night. Could she be more obviously a vampire? Well, maybe she thought people would assume she was a Goth or a club kid. She seemed real cozy with Euan, and to say they made an odd couple was a bit of an understatement.

The groups separated into three, with the Ressiks refusing to be part of a group that wasn't made up of them alone, and they moved out towards the old Watcher's headquarters, each approaching it from a different direction. Since they were the anchors, Giles and he were in the same group, along with Euan, Drena, Meldane, a vamp he'd seen at Hashim's old nest (Violetta), three others he didn't know (but generally resembled soccer hooligans), and a weird, sullen vampire everybody just called 'Shadow'.

There were traffic noises and street noises, the typical sounds of a London evening, until they were a block and a half away from the target - then it got eerily quiet, like a lead shield had slammed down around them. "Oh, how fuckin' weird is this?" Euan said. "I ain't pickin' up anything with a heartbeat around 'ere. Well, 'cept you three."

"I hope we're not too late," Giles muttered under his breath, shoving his cut hand in his pocket. He was wearing a Burberry style trenchcoat, which - while stylish - seemed impractical, as it was a stuffy night, hardly cooler than the daytime. But by the way it seemed to hang heavy on the right side, Logan assumed he had a weapon or something hidden under it.

"Can you really stand up to this guy?" Logan asked. "I mean, I'm gettin' the impression this guy - gal, whatever - is pretty good at throwing magic around."

He watched Giles's jaw tense, and he just knew bad news was coming. "Honestly? Probably not. But I'm just bait. I'll draw them out, and make them expose themselves."

"And then what? We attack?"

At least that got a chuckle out of him. "God no. I know a very powerful witch, who should be remote viewing us right about now. As soon as he or she attacks me, they'll reveal both their strength and their weakness, and she should be able to neutralize them, or at least slow them down. It will be up to us then to … finish the job."

"You're assuming you're not dead."

He rolled a shoulder half-heartedly, and Logan realized he either didn't care, or was so accustomed to such dire predicaments he couldn't even work up a decent emotional response anymore. "I figured my time was up a long time ago, Logan. I just seem to have been extraordinarily lucky. I'm willing to see if my luck holds."

They were just a single corner away when the group broke up one more time, the vampires disappearing into alleys or going up to the roofs of buildings that looked out on that block, and at Giles's urging, Logan went with them, and ended up sharing a roof with Violetta and Shadow. They both looked at him funny when he climbed over the edge of the roof, and he hissed a quiet but sharp, "What?"

Violetta answered, but he wasn't surprised about that. A clear eyed brunette who gave off the aura of a high priced lawyer, at least she was willing to talk. Shadow not only didn't seem to talk, it didn't seem he had any expression beyond "sulk". "We're not used to Humans being able to do that."

He didn't know what to say to that, so he just shrugged and joined them crouching at the far edge of the roof.

The construction site seemed to be lit from within, the opaque tarps glowing white, but they still couldn't see a damn thing inside. But Euan had been right a block ago: there was no one anywhere. This part of London was a ghost town, and it made his skin crawl. Of course it was wrong, and of course it was bad, but what could they do about it now?

There was movement behind the tarp, something that couldn't be ascribed to the meager breeze, and a man came out holding what looked like a small club - an unlit torch? The man looked like he was well into middle age, with drastically thinning brown hair with a few wisps of gray, but he wore tailored pants and a buttoned down blue shirt that was buttoned up all the way, in spite of the temperature, although his sleeves were rolled up. Still, his wardrobe, right down to what looked like expensive Italian loafers, was as inappropriate as Giles's … and similar? Oh no.

He looked about Giles's height too, although he had about thirty pounds on him, and his face was starting to fill out in a way that suggested he'd have a nice set of jowls in a couple years' time. The man seemed to be searching in his pocket for a lighter, but then he stopped and looked around warily, as if he'd heard something. If so, he had better hearing than he did.

"Ned?" Giles said, his quiet voice still shocking in the stillness.

The man with the unlit torch looked at him sharply, everything in his body posture tensing for attack, but then he relaxed as soon as he saw Giles walking down the center of the inexplicably empty street all alone. "Bloody hell - Rupert? What are you doing here?"

"I could ask you the same thing," he replied coolly, still walking towards him. Logan tried to will him to stop, to keep his distance, but that never seemed to work. "I thought you went to Malta."

Ned shrugged, holding the unlit torch at his side. It would probably be a good weapon if it came to that. "For a while. But I got bored. What about you? I heard you've been hiding out in the Cotswolds. Did guilt finally get the better of you?"

Even from his high vantage point, he could see Giles's shoulders stiffen. "What does that mean?"

He scoffed. "You know damn well what I mean. You got out, and so many others died, so many friends, colleagues, and idiot buggers you couldn't stand. The latter must have been a relief, I suspect."

"I take no pleasure in anyone's death."

Even against the night sky, where light pollution from the city knocked out most of the stars, Logan saw dark shapes circling far above them, nightmarish shapes that glided silently, but looked as large as pterodactyls: the Vilkacis, finally arrived. They must have followed his scent, or had been tracking them from above all along. You could never trust a demigod, but at least they had showed up. Of course, he had no guarantee they wouldn't rip them all to pieces once they were done with Anzu, but they'd burn that bridge if they got there.

"Who is this guy?" Violetta whispered. "I thought we didn't know who we were up against."

"We didn't. But maybe he did."

Ned was ignoring Giles, looking around him into the dark. "Still with that loser brigade? Those sad little children you sacrificed your career and reputation for?"

"They have lives without me now. So do I. What are you doing here?"

From his high vantage point, Logan could see the change in Ned's expression and posture, a smug smirk appearing on his plump face. "Cut the crap, Rupert. You know, don't you? Why the hell else would you have left your cozy hideaway in the countryside? Do you actually think you - and whoever you brought with you - can stop me?"

"Stop you from doing what? I have no idea what half-assed plan you have in mind. Are you going to try and raise them, is that it? Restore them?"

Violetta leaned into him, her hair tickling his ear. "What are they talking about?"

"I dunno." But that was something of a lie, as he was starting to put it together. Ned was a former Watcher, just like Giles, and they didn't have the best of relationships when they were working ostensibly together. (Giles was at HQ t he day it blew up? Funny, he never mentioned that.)

Ned laughed, but it was a cold and hard thing. "Raise those bastards? Oh please. Waste all this time and energy for them? Don't even joke."

"So why all the death, Ned? What is this about?"

"What is this about? My dear Rupert, it was all about drawing you out, or at least some other bunch of do-gooders or angry vampires. Didn't matter, as long as they have some kind of blood in their veins. It will all work." Logan could see Ned's eyes were changing; it looked like they were filming over black, his eyes being eclipsed. The breeze had started to pick up, but it seemed to be swirling around Ned, kicking up a dust devil. "Do I really have to tell you the plot? Are you that senile now? We were raised and trained to fight a never-ending war, and what happened? We scattered, we lost focus, we allowed ourselves to be decimated by an enemy that has scattered and is far more mobile and insidious than we will ever be. We need a target, a focal point, a place where we evil concentrates so we can do our duties and destroy it. And that's why I'm a better Watcher than you will ever be. I care enough about my people and my world to do the right thing and sacrifice myself for a greater good."

"A demon magnet?" Giles said, his voice growing louder and angrier in response to the rising wind. He didn't seem frightened yet, just disgusted. "Are you insane? You're talking about opening a Hellmouth, aren't you?"

Ned just grinned, the energy he was giving off as charged as static electricity, even from this distance. Here was their sorcerer. "And the blood of you and your cohorts are the final ingredient. At least you can be useful in death."

They were so screwed it was unbelievable.


	11. Part 11

"What did he say?" Violetta asked. "This is a trap? We were set up?"

"Looks that way," Logan agreed, as the energy swirling around Ned began to take on a hint of color, something golden and red and dangerous, and

he heard someone shout something unintelligible. What looked like a bolt of red energy jumped from the alley where Meldane had been hiding, sizzling straight towards Ned, and since had been focusing on Giles, he didn't see it in time.

But it was academic. The bolt hit the dust devil of energy around Ned, and seemed to just splash off, as if he'd hit him with a water balloon. Ned shouted something and held out his hand, and a burst of the energy surrounding him shot out like a bullet, hitting the alley and exploding with the brilliance of a hand grenade.

"How can this be a set up if we never even had a sodding plan in the first place?" Violetta exclaimed, backing away from the edge of the roof. "It's no fucking fair!"

Giles shouted something that sounded like an incantation and reached under his coat, but Ned held put his other hand and Giles froze; the faintest wisps of energy seemed to be traveling between them, flowing from Giles and into Ned. Logan popped his claws, startling Shadow, and carved off a chunk of brick from the roof. So that energy protected Ned from a mystical attack - did it protect him from a physical one? He threw the brick as hard as he could, aiming straight for his head.

The chunk of brick passed through the energy veil, making it ripple like a pond, and beaned Ned square in the left temple, making him stagger back a step, the energy strand between him and Giles breaking and dissipating in the turbulent air. "Good arm," Violetta remarked.

But even though he hit the target, Ned looked up at them with his black eyes, upper lip curled in a snarl. "Uh oh. Move," Logan shouted to the vampires, bolting for the side of the roof that looked down on the alley that hadn't yet been blown up. He didn't see much, just a bright flash of light out of the corner of his eye.

He didn't quite complete his jump off the roof before the top half of the building exploded in mystic fire, the force of it slamming him face first into the wall of the neighboring building, and he lost consciousness for a second or two. He came to on impact with the asphalt, tasting blood in his mouth and feeling sore, his face even hurting from where skin had been scraped away. He was surrounded by chunks of building, and a very pissed off looking Violetta and Shadow were staring down at him, debris in their hair. "What a great move," she said, sarcasm dripping from her voice. "Make him blow us up."

"He missed," Logan grumbled, climbing to his feet and shaking his head in a poor attempt to make his ears stop ringing.

"We're out of here," she said, heading towards the back of the alley. "Try not to die."

"Fine, run out. I bet Hashim'll be impressed."

"You have to live to tell him," she shot back.

Good point.

Giles completed whatever incantation he intended to use, and threw something at Ned, which just splashed off his shields like everything else. But they briefly turned a noxious color, the gray-purple of bad meat, before cycling back to a more potent orange color. "Rebound spell," Ned chuckled. "Good. Not good enough, but a worthy try."

The tarp moved, and Glenn/Anzu stepped out from behind it, and asked, "We on?"

"You're not," Ned replied sharply. "I think this geezer's run out of time. No food for you."

"I don't know about that. You should feel the energy he's giving off." His eyes started to glow, and he said, in his strangely gravely voice, "He's connected with others; many others. He's been joined by a - ack!" Anzu's sentence was cut off by a dive bombing pterodactyl, with seemed to grow tentacles as it plummeted towards him at mach one, and knocked him ass over tip back into the construction site, ripping down all the tarps.

Ned looked shocked, and held out an arm towards Anzu, who was still screaming as a thousand razor sharp tentacles started tearing into him, with noises that sounded like a sushi chef boning fugu. Ned started saying something in Latin, but he got out the first syllable before another Vilkacis swooped down and plowed him into the site.

And then all the others descended, like starving vultures on a fresh kill, and the sound of screaming - Human, demon, Vilkacis - filled the air, along with the wet sound of tearing flesh. Logan wiped away the blood on his face and went over to Giles, who was bent over in the middle of the street, looking for all the world like he as catching his breath. He hoped that was it.

"Giles? You okay man?" he asked, feeling like a complete idiot. Sure he was fine; just attacked by a nutso sorcerer, but he's hunky dory.

Still he nodded, and eventually looked up, revealing that he was actually leaning on a sword, presumably the weapon he had stashed under his coat. He looked pale, and his glasses were gone, but at least he was alive, and didn't looked aged. "Fine. We can't let the Vilkacis kill them in there."

"Why the hell not?"

"Because the blood might open the Hellmouth, that's why."

Suddenly gunshots rang out from the far end of the street, and Giles instinctively flinched, but Logan knew just from the way the sound carried that the shots were away from them, not towards them. "Who the bloody hell has guns?" he wondered crossly.

Logan took a wild stab. "The Ressiks. I assume Ned's back up showed. Look, how screwed are we here?"

"He wasn't expecting the Vilkacis. That may have given us an edge."

"Enough of one?"

As if on cue, Ned shouted something, and there was a huge explosion of golden light, like a dozen flash bangs going off at once, and the huge, tentacled bulks of the Vilkacis went flying out in all directions, forcing him and Giles to both duck to avoid the lethal tentacles. "So, that witch friend of yours?" he asked.

"Any minute now," Giles assured him.

They could vaguely hear sounds of fighting around them, and it seemed that the vampires had engaged whatever evil minions Ned had closing in on them, but from the screeches and sounds of dusting, they were losing as much as winning.

Ned emerged from the site, which was clearly some kind of Hellmouth sacrificial altar, and he came out of it glowing, bathed in hot molten light that surrounded him head to foot like a shroud. They could barely see his face behind its veil, but Logan could tell he was pissed off.

"You deal with devils now, do you Rupert? Why am I not surprised?"

"No, I deal with devils," Logan said, wondering if he could draw his fire. Admittedly, mystical shit could probably kill him stone dead in a way that physical weapon never could, but he had to try. He started slowly moving away, and just like he'd hoped, Ned's eyes followed.

"And what exactly are you? You look like a werewolf."

"I get that a lot." He tried to take another step away, but he suddenly froze; it was like his body wasn't responding anymore. And then he realized he couldn't breathe.

"Whatever your plan is, forget it. You're out of your league."

Giles threw the sword, and it embedded itself hilt deep in Ned's chest with a sound like a hammer punching through meat. He staggered, and suddenly Logan felt like he could breathe again. "It ends here," Giles insisted. "Your plan is insane. You will make us more vulnerable to threats, not less. Stop this now before I have to kill you."

Even with a sword through his chest and sticking out his back, Ned wouldn't fall down, and since he'd just threatened to kill him, Giles must have known that. Ned grabbed the hilt, and sneered. "You couldn't threaten a wet paper bag, you decrepit old man."

The ground started to tremble; it was minor, but growing steadily in intensity. Ned gave them both an ugly, gloating smile, and Giles whispered breathlessly, "No."

Logan didn't need to ask - it was Hellmouth city now, wasn't it? Shit.

Ned pulled the sword out of his body, and held it over his head menacingly, but before he could do much else, something even more inexplicable than usual happened.

What looked like a glowing orb the size of a cantaloupe seemed to drop out of the sky and hover in mid air about twenty feet above them, giving off such a curious energy that even Ned turned to look up at it. "What the -" he began, as the orb seemed to erupt into a burst of blinding light that briefly lit up the block light it was high noon.

As soon as the light faded, and Logan was able to blink away most of the afterimages, he saw Ned standing before them, sword still held in a defensive position, looking slightly flummoxed. His shield was gone; the magic energies that had been surrounding him had completely disappeared.

He had a single moment to panic, it flashed through his eyes like lightning, then Logan lunged for him.

It sounded like he shouted something like "Fire!" in Latin, and as Logan popped his claws and slammed them into his midsection, Ned grabbed his face, and heat sizzled into his skin, burning away his flesh and muscle, going straight to bone.

The pain was indescribable, his nerves being eaten away as slowly as possible, a bright white light of agony exploding in his brain. He heard himself screaming, but was unable to do anything except rip his claws to the side before he hit the pavement. His skin continued to sizzle and smolder, the scent of his own charred flesh filling his nostrils and making him dizzy. But the pain was subsiding, and he heard a wet splash on the ground beside him that made him push himself up on his side and look.

He'd cut Ned completely in half.

He couldn't actually see his lower half, just his feet (yep - Bruno Magli shoes), but he could see him from his head to stomach, which was where Logan's claws had sunk in and ripped through. His intestines were spilling out, along with a wash of dark blood and lumpy pieces of internal organs, but his eyes were wide and clearly indicative of consciousness, at least for now. "Holy shit," he said, to no one in particular. Then his eyes clouded over, and his chest stopped its spasmodic rising, as the scent of death started coming off him, strong and sour.

"Dear lord," Giles said somewhere behind him.

"I could've controlled if he didn't burn me," Logan muttered, his own words sounding funny to him. He pushed himself up, and felt a little lightheaded, but he figured after having half his face burnt off, it was normal to feel that way.

Giles came over and grabbed his arm, helping him to his feet, but as soon as he saw his face his eyes widened and he jerked his head back, as if he'd seen something so awful he could barely hold down his lunch. "You - oh god, I'll get you to a hospital -"

It was that bad, huh? "No need; I'll heal."

Giles was grimacing, reacting in sympathy to the pain he must assumed he was feeling. Frankly, with most of the nerves burned away on the left side of his face, he wasn't feeling any pain at all. When they regenerated … well, that's when he would need the oxycontin. "I - I can see your jaw and cheekbone. They are metal."

"Told ya." He could feel a breeze in the left side of his mouth, and figured that's why he thought he was talking funny - and why Giles couldn't look at him without blanching and quickly looking away.

The ground continued rumbling, and they could see that something was starting to appear; the pit formerly lined with intestines was now swirling with energy. It was now the size of a mud puddle, but Logan was sure it was going to get bigger, and soon. "How do we stop this?"

Giles retrieved his sword, which was now smeared with blood. From the heat on his back, Logan realized he had been chopped with the sword before he tore Ned in two, but compared to the pain of having half of his face burnt away hurt a hell of a lot more. "Honestly? I have no idea."

There was shifting in the rubble, a tarp slid aside and was pulled towards the small energy vortex, and Anzu stood up shakily, looking like he was a stiff breeze away from falling over, covered with rips and slices, gashes that made his look blood red and savaged with a jigsaw. He was still healing, but since he'd been sliced up like a pizza, it was going to take a while. He glared at them, eyes glowing like a furnace, blood oozing from a thosand different cuts, and he grated, "Give me your -"

A gunshot cut off whatever else he was going to say. It tore through the side of his head in a fountain of blood and bone, taking part of his right ear with it, and he was so weak he toppled over like a binge drinker after a kegger. The Ressiks were there, their semi-automatics gleaming in the light given off from the vortex and torches, and the copper one asked, "Is he responsible for this shit?"

Giles looked horrified that they would shoot without confirming the identity first, but that was Ressiks for you. "Yes. But he's a demigod. You can't -"

"Oh yeah? Watch." Anzu was still moving, trying to push himself up, but the Ressiks surrounded him in a loose semi-circle and opened fired. They emptied their clips into him, popped the empty ones, slammed new clips in, and started shooting him again with an almost mechanical fluidity. It was a Tarantino-esque bit of ultra violence that was almost funny in its basic implacable inhumanity. They were blasting him into microscopic fragments, getting him all over their oddly expensive suits.

"Can they actually kill him that way?" Logan asked Giles.

The Englishman was staring at them with a slightly contemptuous glance, but with their collective backs to them, they didn't notice. "Anzu? No, but Ressiks know what they're doing when it comes to killing gods. They're probably working on the assumption that obliterating the Human host will be enough to get rid of him."

"Right, he can't exist in this dimension solo." But then he realized what Giles had said about the Ressiks, and asked, "Why would they know about killing gods?"

"Well, according to mythology, they were created by a hellgod to specifically be his army against other gods and halflings, which is why they're generally immune to god energy and powers: they're designed to be."

"So, if they're such god killers, what the hell are they doing here? Oh, wait, don't tell me - is this one of those things where he made them actually immune to his own powers, and they revolted and killed the son-of-a-bitch?"

"You've heard this story before, have you? Yes, that's exactly what happened, and some gods got nervous, and exiled them to a godless world, where they couldn't harm them or their kind. Or at least none of their kind that didn't deserve to be hurt."

"Earth. Cute." Well, if true, that explained why Ressiks and their Frenik "cousins" were immune to Bob - and Anzu, apparently. The nerves must have been starting to regenerate, because damn, was his face starting to ache like a motherfucker.

"What are you doing there?" Meldane asked, as he came up to them with a sour look on his face. "Are we going to close the hellmouth before it opens or not?"

Giles matched him glare for glare. "And how do you propose we do that?"

That made Meldane scoff. "You're joking, right? I close them all the time; some asshead keeps tryin' to open one in the Metro every year. Wanna give me a hand?"

Which was more startling - the fact that Meldane knew something Giles didn't, or that Meldane actually proved useful? Giles recovered with aplomb, though, and said, "Yes, of course."

Meldane looked at him finally, and grimaced like he'd just bitten down on a fish head in his soup. "Oh god, you might wanna put a bag over your head or something. You look like a Halloween mask."

"Fuck you too." It seemed somehow funny though, as the sounds of gunshots continued to ring through the night (the Ressiks must have been on their fifth clips now, making him wonder if there was anything left of Glenn to shoot; his body was probably a bunch of quarter sized fragments by now), and the two spellcasters wandered off towards the hellmouth to shut it down.

Logan looked around, pretty sure the sounds of dusting had stopped - for good or for ill - and damn was he hurting. He really wanted to sit down now, or better yet, pass out face first in a beer. Presuming, of course, the beer didn't sting his wound, or just dribble out the open side of his mouth.

Shit, this sucked.

* * *

The end of the hellmouth was the end of the fight, as Ned and Anzu's minions beat it, apparently aware that their side had lost. He was sitting against a building, trying not to pass out, gritting his teeth against the pain of his muscles and nerves regenerating, when Hashim and his people came by to see what had happened. He saw that Euan and his blue haired girlfriend were among the survivors, but he couldn't see Violetta and Shadow. But they could have been there, just loitering among the back of the crowd.

Hashim grimaced at him, which was almost the final straw for him. "That looks … unfortunate."

"No shit, Sherlock. We done here?"

"We appear to be."

"Ugh!" Vampire Scott exclaimed, and looked away as he pointed down at both sets of Ned's remains. "Who the fuck did this?"

Hashim looked down at him. "Your handy work?"

Logan glared up at him as he used the wall to climb up to his feet. His face felt like it was on fire once more, but since it was taking longer than the first time, the pain seemed a bit worse. "He pissed me off."

Hashim smiled ever so slightly, a bit admiring and a bit evil. "You're positive you're Human? You'd make an excellent demon."

"I'll pretend that's a compliment."

The Ressiks came over en masse, their guns still out but held down at their sides in a neutral position; they were still smoking , and after having had fired so many clips, Logan imagined they were far too hot to put away just this moment. "Are we even?" the copper Ressik demanded.

Hashim regarded him coolly, all his humor gone, and he seemed to deliberate much more than he needed to, just to make the Ressiks stew. "Yes, I suppose we are. Consider your debt paid."

"Fuck yeah it's paid. And if I ever see you again, blood sucker, I'll twist your head off with my bare hands." After a final evil glare, the Ressik and his well dressed crew of thugs stalked off into the night, trailing a heavy scent of cordite and blood.

"They're such a pleasant breed, aren't they?" Hashim noted wryly.

"They get the job done," Logan pointed out needlessly. He just felt they deserved some respect, if only for wasting hundreds of dollars worth of ammo on Glenn. And here he thought the Vilkacis would take care of Anzu.

"They do. Killing is about all their good for."

"The same could be said of your kind," Giles said, walking over to them with Meldane in tow. They both looked a bit ashen but otherwise okay. "You're Hashim, I presume?"

Hashim eyed him warily, all business. "I am. And what Watcher are you?"

If Giles was surprised he knew he was a Watcher on sight, he didn't let it show. "Rupert Giles. I doubt you've heard of me."

"You'd be correct."

It was like a British version of a staring contest. They were competing to see who could be more icy and contemptuous without letting any true passion flare. And as far as Logan could tell, it was a tie. "I think you should release Meldane from his debt as well, don't you?"

Again, Hashim made a show of thinking about it, but this time he didn't seem to be enjoying it. "I suppose. But you're not really here to petition for a washed up defender of Britain, are you?"

What? What was that supposed to mean? Meldane was just a washed up magician, wasn't he? But Giles didn't react to that, he simply matched him glare for glare. "Just because there's no headquarters doesn't mean you aren't being watched, Hashim. Consider yourself on notice."

He smirked, the corner of his mouth curving up ever so slightly, dark eyes glittering like diamonds. "Is that a threat, old man?"

"It's information. Now where's Ruby?"

"She wolfed out," Euan said, mainly because it didn't look like Hashim was inclined to answer. "We left her gnawin' on some of Anzu's … well, whatever the fuck they were. Nasty buggers."

Giles sighed, and looked back at Meldane. "Do you have a tranquilizer gun?"

"No, but I suppose I could get her with a sleep spell."

"It won't last long on a werewolf."

Meldane just shrugged. "We can tie her up in the meantime, get the amulet back on her."

Giles looked at him like he was insane. "And what if she wakes up while we're doing this?"

"I'll do it," Logan grudgingly volunteered. "I'm strong enough to hold her down, and even if she rips a big hunk out of my arm, I don't think I'll catch wolf germs. My immune system's pretty powerful."

Giles looked like he wanted to object, but he reconsidered and decided not to. "Considering your cheek has almost completely grown back, I'm inclined to believe you."

"Which way?" Logan asked Euan. Both he and Drena helpfully pointed over their shoulders, and he nodded a thanks.

"So that's how it's going to be, Logan?" Hashim asked, giving him a curious but hard stare.

What was this? Did he actually think he could recruit him to his side, make him a right hand man in his organization, an enforcer? Was this whole thing a sort of professional vetting? He scowled at him - he really didn't like being played in any way, shape, or form - and said, "You didn't actually think it was gonna end in any other way, did'ja? I'm Human."

"You're a born warrior, and very few Humans are. You don't belong with them."

"I don't belong with _anybody_. But I'm starting to get cool with that." And, remarkably, he was. There were just some things you couldn't fight, no matter how hard you tried.

The vampires made way for them as they walked off, but Logan wondered if it had anything to do with the fact that he had torn Ned in half like an old phone book. He supposed it didn't hurt.

But what about Meldane? Defender of Britain? What could that possibly mean? He couldn't have been a Watcher, as he didn't seem like one, and surely Ruby or Giles would have known if he was.

Wait … he had said his name was Mordred. Was it possible that he …?

Nah. He'd believe a lot of things, but he wasn't quite ready to go that far.

10

Scott sat on the end of his motel bed, wondering how an air conditioner could make so much noise and yet do nothing, and stared at the object that was supposed to render Bob harmless.

It sat on top of the t.v. as there was really nowhere else to put it in this small room, and he found himself staring at it, somewhat mesmerized by its ugliness. It looked like a melted tiki statue made of obsidian, no bigger than a pop can and just a bit thicker, although it felt like it weighed twenty pounds, and it made him slightly ill if he held it for too long, like he'd have to go lay down before he collapsed. If it had that effect on him, would it have an even more profound effect on Bob? Or had Forajo sold him a nice, solid lump of bullshit?

The more he looked at the obsidian statue, the more he thought he saw distorted, screaming faces carved into it depths, like a window straight into hell. He was starting to think that maybe - just maybe - he was making a mistake.

But no, how could he be? He needed answers about Jean, and only Bob could give them to him. But unless he had some strong impetus, he couldn't count on Bob to tell him the truth.

"So what's this about?" Bob asked from the bathroom doorway, making him jump. He'd had no idea he had ceased to be alone.


	12. Part 12

Scott got to his feet, feeling almost defensive. "What are you … haven't you heard of knocking?"

Bob shrugged. "Sure, but where's the fun in that?" Bob was inexplicably wearing knee length surfer shorts, bright blue with little green and brown palm trees on them, showing off what seemed to be a reasonably good tan, and a loose butter yellow tank top with what looked like some kind of dried fruit decal in the center, surrounded by the legend '_Eat Me Dates'_. (Oh man, he so didn't want to know.) His hair was mussed, a bit more blond than usual (sun bleached?), and slightly longer than it had been last time he'd seen him. "Working in another dimension" his ass - he'd clearly been lounging at the beach, the disingenuous bastard. All he was missing was the zinc smear on his nose.

Suddenly he winced and grabbed his head, letting out a small groan of pain. "Bloody hell, mate, you got a relic of Oberlyn in here?"

How the hell did he know that? Although he had planned this all out in his head, now that Bob was here, now that he had surprised him, he wasn't sure what to do. He stood up, and did his best to focus. "I want to -"

"- know about Jean, right, yeah, got that," Bob interrupted. He was squinting in pain, a palm pressed up to his temple, like he was having a savage migraine attack. "What about her? And what the hell are you doing with an Oberlyn fetish?"

Something about his annoyed tone made Scott angry, and he remembered exactly how he wanted to do this. "What about her? How dare you say that! What the hell have you done to her?"

"Huh? What are y -" he didn't just pause, he froze, cobalt eyes hardening like ice. He was staring intently at something over Scott's shoulder.

He turned, and saw Jean standing against the far wall, giving them both a smile that quickly grew into something leering and evil. "Hello Bob," she said, but there was something wrong about her voice. It sounded correct, but since when had Jean ever had a tone of voice quite that cold? "I ssee you've hardly changed."

And since when had she had a lisp?

Bob grabbed his arm hard and yanked him behind him, putting himself between Scott and Jean. "Get out of here," Bob muttered grimly. "He wants me, not you."

"He?"

Jean laughed, a sharp, harsh bark that seemed contemptuous. "He doessn't know; he'ss jusst a stupid Human. He believess what hiss eyess tell him - or better yet, hiss mind. Why even try and protect him, Bob? He'ss your Judass; he jusst led you to your death."

In the blink of an eye, Scott saw that it wasn't Jean, but something hideous. Humanoid, yes, but something like snakeskin stretched taut over a skeletal frame, brown and silver diamond shapes scales clinging to his (?) emaciated body like spandex. His torso seemed unusually long and thin, as did what passed for his arms, and his head was slightly bulbous, with huge horizontal slits for eyes, pupils glowing yellow from within irises of bloody crimson. Its mouth was a like a black gash in its flat face.

How could he have been so stupid? How could he have ever believed that that thing was Jean?

"Fine, whatever Xiuh," Bob agreed, still shoving him back towards the door. He was still trying to protect him? Why? "Let's just take this somewhere else, huh?"

The thing Bob had called Xiuh (what kind of name was that?) made a rasping noise that Scott assumed was its version of a laugh. "And spare the Human? Remove you from the realm of Oberlyn's power? How dumb do you think I am? I was dead, not mentally crippled."

He understood now, and couldn't believe what a fool he had been. He thought he was setting a trap for Bob, and he had been - but he was the bait. He was simply a tool to get to Bob, and nothing more. Revenge for Jean wasn't to be had, because Bob had done nothing to her - or at least not what he had been led to believe. This … thing had been pushing all the right emotional buttons to get him to do exactly what he wanted, and serve him up Bob on a silver platter.

The thing raised its hand, like it was lifting an invisible book, and for some reason Bob tensed and lunged for him, yelling, "No!"

But the whole room exploded into flame, and the last thing Scott thought was that he had probably deserved this.

11

The most helpless thing in the world was to know something was wrong, and yet be perfectly unable to do anything about it.

Xavier simply didn't know where to start. Scott was deliberately remaining out of contact, which could only be a bad sign, and considering the mood he left in, Xavier was expecting the worst. Logan wasn't out of contact, just off on his own in London, but listening to the BBC radio news upstairs, he heard there was a "mysterious" incident in London that left several buildings damaged and at least one person dead in what was being described as an "act of extreme violence", and instantly he knew Logan was involved.

Okay, he didn't know, he just assumed the worst. Where Logan went, trouble followed, or at least so it seemed. He was sure if he was involved there was probably a good reason for it - he didn't kill as indiscriminately as Scott liked to think; usually it was in defense of someone, if not himself (although even he had to admit that with Logan's mutation, it was hard to seriously argue self-defense, simply because it was so damn hard to actually kill him) - but he couldn't keep living his life like this. He would never heal from his traumas if he kept running into fights. Yes, it probably made him feel better in the short term to take out his anger and pain in aggression, but in the long run he was simply reinforcing the message that the Organization pounded into his head with all the subtlety of a jackhammer: fighting and killing was all he was good for. No matter what he thought - no matter what Scott or the kids thought - it wasn't true.

Of course, one of the big stumbling blocks was the fact that Logan, in the back of his mind, honestly thought he wanted him here because of his use as a "weapon", to work for them instead of against them as "Weapon X". He'd have been lying if he didn't admit that on some level, he did want Logan where he could keep his eye on him; he was still in a very precarious mental state - strange how years of torture and telepathic raping could do that to a person - and his mutation, combined with his fighting skills and a reservoir of rage that could drown the world, did make him a dangerous man.

But, thank god, Logan was far too independent and distrustful of authority to contract out to the Magnetos of the world, or to fully embrace their ideology. Of course he didn't embrace his either, but Logan didn't trust enough to believe anything wholeheartedly. He'd been burned so many times, it was amazing he believed anything at all. In Logan's world, trust seemed to be a poisonous word, the one thing sure to kill you in the morning.

He honestly believed Logan could be invaluable to them, if he could just find some measure of inner peace, of safety. He knew many things, much more than he probably consciously knew, and he had a rougher, more streetwise point of view that could only be invaluable in many situations. Also, you never had to ask Logan to take one for the team; "lone wolf" tendencies or not, he'd be the first one to draw the attention, draw the fire, simply because he knew most people didn't have what it took to kill him, or even keep him down for long. He and Scott would make an excellent team, each making up for the other's natural weaknesses … if, of course, they could stand each other. That seemed to vary on a day to day basis: sometimes they got along well enough that they forgot to have a pissing contest, other times they seemed to be a second away from taking after each other with chainsaws.

He wasn't too concerned about Logan, at least not for the moment. Right now, his concern was with Scott, mainly because he hadn't been acting like himself. It was bad enough when Jean died, but when it turned out she wasn't dead and yet somehow that was worse - an avatar; a god; a capricious being that seemed nothing like the Jean they knew - something in him seemed to fall apart. The fact that he left the school for a while was, in fact, the least of the signs; the worst sign of his dissolution was this bizarre revenge mission against the Organization. The fact that he would do it at all was an obvious sign that Scott was spiraling out of control, becoming consumed by the very emotions he liked to pretend he didn't have (in itself a psychologically unhealthy thing) - but the fact that he agreed to let some of the older children go along was inexcusable. The Scott he knew would never have put them at risk if he could help it.

And now he had gone off, to who knew where (he'd deactivated the tracer in the jet), to do god knew what. He'd made it clear he hadn't wanted to be disturbed, he hadn't wanted to talk to him, but Xavier was sure he'd come to his sense and contact him, if only to vent some more rage. But it hadn't happened.

Xavier sat in front of the Cerebro console, headpiece in his hands, wondering if he should violate his privacy like this. He'd kept his distance, tried to give him time to find whatever he was looking for, but that news report, as brief and vague as it was, sparked a bad feeling in his gut. Logan probably wasn't in trouble; if there was terrible violence, they had brought something to his turf, and Logan was the master of that domain. If they wanted to fight, they had probably already lost the moment they made the decision to attack. But his mind had settled on Scott, and he couldn't shake the feeling that he was the one in trouble.

He wasn't psychic; he didn't, as a rule, have premonitions. But every now and then he had strong hunches that usually paid off. He sensed this was one of them.

He was still holding the control device in his hands, trying to decide if he should risk losing Scott's trust forever by using Cerebro to track him down, when he sensed that someone was standing at the open door of the chamber.

"Somethin' wrong?" Rogue asked curiously.

He shook his head, still eying the helmet like it was an angry snake. Why did this feel so irrevocable? "No, Marie, everything's fine. I was just considering finding … someone."

"Scott?"

He smirked, dipping his head so she couldn't see it in any way, shape, or form. Sometimes she learned so fast it was shocking. "Perhaps. What are you doing down here? Don't you have class?"

"Not now, no. I suppose I should be doing my homework, but why?"

He set the helmet down on the console, and started maneuvering his chair backwards so he could turn around. "Now Marie, we've discussed this. Studies are important if you want to make something of yourself in this world."

He hadn't realized it, but she was right behind him, and when he thought he had struck her with his chair, she had simply grabbed it. He looked back at her, and realized there was something wrong with the rhythm of her thoughts. Not only that, but there was a strange vacancy in her eyes, like they were staring out at nothing. "I'm gonna make somethin' of myself, starting with you." Before he had time to react, she touched his face - with her bare hand.

* * *

Rogue watched the old man drop to the catwalk, now unconscious as well as useless, and felt his power swirling through her head, opening up psychic doors she had never known existed. It was like everyone's thoughts thrummed, intangible music carried on invisible wires. The things she could do with it …

"Are you done here?" Saddiq asked, coming to the entryway. His thoughts were different, just like hers, regular and almost mechanical. He was the only one she could trust; he was the only one who knew the truth.

"One moment," she said, shoving the old man's wheelchair off the edge of the abyss.

How had she ever been so deluded? How had she never seen it?

Mutants weren't an evolutionary "next step"; they were aberrations, the nuclear age version of freaks in a sideshow. It was so clear it was almost painful, and she could think of nothing else.

Mutants were a scourge on the face of humanity. And she and Saddiq had to stop them, by any means necessary.

* * *

To be continued …. 


End file.
